Today, we are speaking with Athena Turner, brand manager at Xneelo, to learn more about their products and services and what is essential to know about the hosting industry in general.
We hope that you will enjoy this interview.
What is the story behind Xneelo? How long have you been in the market?
Our reputation has been built one customer at a time over the last 22 years. Today we’re known for delivering a consistent, helpful service to the South African business mass market – over 500 000 website business owners. Our relentless focus on customer service has given us an average rating of 4.7/5 On HelloPeter, South Africa’s customer service rating platform.
At
, we’ve always thought of ourselves as business enablers: offering a hosting service that empowers our customers to interact and grow their business online. We chose the name Xneelo (pronounced ex-nee-lo) with care. Inspired by a Latin phrase that translates into the ability to ‘create something out of nothing, ‘ we believe that Xneelo represents our customers’ resourcefulness, ingenuity, and industrious spirit – and of our own team.Everything we do is to benefit our customers and their businesses. They have helped us to grow and to stay true to who we are. Xneelo has built a strong, customer-centric culture with our 24/7 contact center team recognized internationally for the care given to our customers. We received Gold and two Silver awards for customer service at the 2021 international Stevie Awards.
We are in the first quarter of 2022. How is your business moving at the moment?
Our current focus is launching our new xneelo Control Panel, to give our customers a flexible and intuitive self-help experience while focusing on additional security and collaboration benefits. We’re also busy adding additional features to our Managed WordPress offering.
A current challenge that we, together with many of our market counterparts are facing, is the shortage of software engineers. Remote work has changed the playing field and we’re seeing international companies recruit software engineers from South Africa. The escalating war in Ukraine has also had an impact on our engineering team as we have 16 team members based in Ukraine. We are deeply concerned for their safety and well-being. Understandably, work is not a top priority for them right now, and this impacts what we’re able to focus on.
What are the main products and services that you are offering?
We offer the following hosting services:
- Web Hosting and domain registrations/transfers
- Managed WordPress
- Self-Managed Servers
- Managed Servers
- Colocation
At the core of xneelo’s business model is a high level of standardization. This is necessitated by our daily operations that demand a high degree of internal efficiency. Processes have to be replicable in order to remain consistently efficient over a period of time. Automation of processes also makes it easier for us to troubleshoot problems. With these high levels of internal efficiency, we’re able to offer a quality service to our customers at competitive rates.
We noticed that you are offering colocation. Can you tell us a bit more about that service?
When we launched our Colocation service in 2014, the aim was to demystify the process of setting up a colocated server while also
lowering the barrier to entry. Our intention was to simplify the traditionally cumbersome local offering by providing customers with a colocation service in a data center that compares favorably with traditional Tier 3 data centers, without the associated costs and lengthy contracts that usually come with these services.
With our Colocation service:
- Customers can order a colocation rack and have their services commissioned within an hour.
- Customers enjoy 24/7 unattended access with our biometric access system, where their racks are secured with combination key locks.
- We have a ‘pay as you use’ model for power usage. Our customers are only billed for actual kWh consumed per rack. We don’t put any mark-up on the cost of power －we simply pass on the cost.
Our Samrand Data Centre is another factor that sets us apart. For the past few years, our PUE Data Centre scores (Power Usage Effectiveness) have been significantly below industry standards (1.21 instead of 1.40). This energy efficiency translates directly into cost savings for our customers. It’s good for them, and it’s good for the environment.
Our data center has achieved the following to date:
- We have significantly reduced our power consumption and carbon footprint by making use of direct free cooling when the ambient temperature allows for it.
- We have successfully reduced hardware failure by making use of highly efficient and directed cool airflow.
- We efficiently manage expensive data center floor space by making use of a custom high-density design. This design, developed in-house, includes an additional 30% more servers in the same space, without any upgrades to existing building infrastructure, allowing the data center to run in a leaner way while also lowering the maintenance cost per unit. It also allows for the improvement of support services and easier upgrades of product features.
- We offer the highest levels of security with our biometric access system that gives customers 24/7, secure unattended access to their servers.
- We have increased our network resilience by offering multi-homing with a number of upstream network providers.
- We offer a reliable power supply with fully redundant, physically separated A+B power feeds.
- Our in-house engineering and software development teams continuously work on evolving our hosted solutions, hosting platform and infrastructure.
We noticed that you are operating in South Africa. Are there any other markets that you are present with now?
For now, our focus is on the South African market and providing reliable service to our existing customers. An interesting fact is that a few of our customers (3% to be exact) are based outside of South Africa.
We do hope to launch internationally in the next couple of years.
Another thing I would like to ask you is to give us more details about Self-Managed Servers?
Our Self-Managed Server offering provides customers that are more technically inclined with a flexible, robust, and cost-effective hosting option. With our Self-Managed Servers, these customers can manage their own custom server environment on a powerful hardware platform, with full root/administrator access and choice of Linux or Windows Server operating systems.
What happens if there is a spike in traffic. How are you handling that part?
While all our Web Hosting packages offer unlimited traffic, customers are able to monitor their traffic usage through xneelo’s control panel. Our System Administrators receive hourly notifications, reporting on high traffic volumes on our Web Hosting and Managed Servers. A modest threshold is set and excessive activity investigated. Should a concern arise, customers are informed.
In addition, our network is resilient to DDoS attacks (a distributed denial-of-service attack). We also assist customers to secure their websites by offering Cloudbric, a cloud-based web application firewall for an additional monthly fee. Customers can try out this feature with our one-month free trial.
Looking through the eye of the customer, what do you think is the most important thing for a hosting provider? What should every customer look at first?
It’s important to identify what your hosting needs are so that you’re able to assess and select the right hosting product to meet your current and future growth requirements. As an example, when starting out, you may not need the resources of an entire server. However, if you require a lot of disk space or expect large volumes of traffic to your website, you may want to host your website or application on an entire server, either our Managed Server or Self-Managed Server offering.
In addition, many customers don’t realize the partnership element in a web hosting provider. A web project always evolves and you will need support at some level, throughout. It’s a certainty that the technology will change over time and it will affect you. Our advice is to test the levels of support by either calling or sending an email to a shortlist of recommended hosting providers. Get a sense of their response times and their consultation advice. When you choose a web hosting company, you are choosing a partner that will need to scale and adapt to your business.
It’s not always easy to compare the various options of different web hosting providers. Always pay particular attention to any hidden costs and long-term contracts that may make it difficult for you to move in the future.
What new features, technology are you planning to introduce in the next period?
We’ll be launching a CDN service to our existing customers in the first half of this year. This new service will allow customers to optimize their websites’ performance and load speed as it makes it possible to deliver content closer to the user.
We’re also working on a new product category – Virtual Private Servers., which we hope to launch in our current market in the near future.
Finally, anything else you would like to add to our readers about Xneelo that we missed?
At xneelo, we work relentlessly to create a flat organizational structure. We value operational transparency and simplicity, as well as ownership through the principles of self-organization and autonomy in a supportive environment. There is a culture of trust within the organization that inspires people to grow and learn. The aim is for people to manage themselves rather than a dependency on a layered hierarchy of management. One of the principles of the self-organizing team is that it comes up with the answers from within.
Five years from now we simply want to provide new value regularly and get better at what we already do: delivering a reliable and long-term value proposition to our customers by providing a hosting service they can trust.
