With a gazillion web hosting companies out there claiming 99% uptime, unlimited resources, and knowledgeable support; cutting through jargon and making an informed decision of choosing the right web host can be a herculean task. I choose the word ‘right’ and not ‘perfect’ because the kind of web host best suited for you depends, among various other factors, on your business and the type of website you want to host.
And this, I believe is a factor which makes Eleven2 stand out. They’re a great choice for just about any business and any type of website. There are companies who specialize in low-price shared hosting, and are suitable for personal or very small business websites with low traffic. And there are companies who specialize in dedicated & VPS hosting and their expensive plans are suitable for only the blue mammoths. Eleven2 is unique in a way that it brings together the best of both worlds. They can offer feature -rich plans to those with greater needs, and at the same time compete with companies that specialize in low-price hosting; which is probably due to the fact that it is a company born out of need, by a man who couldn’t find a decent hosting solution, and thus decided to come up with his own.
There are loads of other features to like about the company too, but I’ll let Mr. Andy Johnson, Creative Director, eleven2 do the talking.
We are effectively a “Web Based” company. We wouldn’t exist without the internet. Web trends and standards are moving so quickly. The mobile world is growing, more people are using smartphones than ever before. We are taking advantage of changes like this, by developing more mobile based hosting tools for our customer base. And that’s just one example of how we’re adapting to change.
– Mr. Andy Johnson, Creative Director, eleven2.
Mr. Andy Johnson, Creative Director, eleven2.
Q : What is your name and role with eleven2? How long have you been in this role?
A : My name is Andy Johnson, and I am the Creative Director here at eleven2. I have been in this role for almost three years now! I joined the e2 team back in July 2010.
Q : For those who don’t know what eleven2 is, can you please brief it a bit?
A: Eleven2 is a web hosting provider comprised of talented designers, developers, musicians, film makers, business owners, writers, photographers, and much more. We host over 100,000 websites, and have been in business ten years now. We offer Shared Hosting, Reseller Hosting, Cloud Servers, VPS’s and Dedicated Servers.
Q: Let’s start all the way back to the Starbucks coffee shop. How did eleven2 come into being?
A: I have only been on the team three years, but Rodney Giles founded the company back in 2003, inside a Starbucks coffee shop. I believe Rodney was working as a freelancer, and couldn’t find a decent hosting solution. Going back and forth between different hosting companies, Rodney then decided to start his own. Thus, eleven2 was born.
Q: eleven2 has seen major growth since its inception in February 2004. When you look back, what is one factor that you would say contributed most to your growth?
A: There are many factors that have contributed to our growth over the years. Design is a key player. We focus a lot of time on making our front-end and back-end control panel’s user interfaces look the very best they can. Customers like simplicity, and to be able to manage their hosting easily.
Another factor that has contributed to our growth, is our support. We are here 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. We never close our doors. Although our phones are only open during the week, our livechat team are available 24/7 via livechat, and our technicians never stop monitoring our network. Our feature offering is extremely rich (litespeed & cloudlinux), and our pricing is also unbeatable (for the features you receive).
Q : eleven2 launched a Dedicated server range in June last year. Now it’s a competitive dedicated server market out there. What makes Eleven2 better than others? Why should customers pick up your dedicated server plans over others?
A: Unlike other providers, eleven2’s Dedicated Server range comes fully managed. Your server will be monitored by our technicians 24 hours a day. Our server pricing is extremely competitive, when you look at the specification of our servers. We built our Dedicated platform with flexibility in mind. As customers’ sites grow, they can increase RAM, HDD space, and much more, making us the ideal server partner for growth going forward.
Q: Can you tell our readers about various types of hosting and reseller plans eleven2 offers today?
A: We offer a variety of hosting plans at the moment (with more products launching in Q2 this year). Our shared hosting platform is ideal for small – medium sized websites. We offer four shared hosting plans, and our entire server network runs LiteSpeed & Cloudlinux.
LiteSpeed is able to deliver static content up to 6x faster than Apache web server, and PHP content 50% faster. Combine that with CloudLinux, where each customer is isolated in their own lightweight virtualized environment and you get incredible reliability and uptime.
With our Reseller plans, customers get a free dedicated IP address, and WHM control panel to manage all their different websites with their own cPanel account. Resellers also get free billing software. We currently offer WHMCS and ClientExec to our Resellers. Our reseller hosting plans all run on LiteSpeed and CloudLinux too.
We are also launching VPS’s and Cloud Servers in Q2 this year. Stay tuned.
Q: Must say, the e2Brain’s Network Status System looks really promising and streamlines hosting services in a way that’s unprecedented. What was your thought process behind coming up with this feature?
A: We wanted to develop a system that alerts customers when there are issues. What we found was happening, is say for example when a server went down, we would get 50 support tickets all about the same issue. We didn’t think it was a good use of technicians’ time replying to duplicate tickets over and over again.
S
o we came up with our e2 Network Status system. Customers are alerted if there is an issue with one of their services. This way, we can keep everyone in the loop about problems / issues, and utilize our technical resources to maximum potential.
Q: This one is regarding implementation of CloudLinux on eleven2’s servers. How significant was its impact on the uptime on all servers? And how has the response been from customer side?
A: Customers love CloudLinux. And our technicians do too. It helps our infrastructure run much smoother, compared to other Linux versions. Since implementing CloudLinux, we have noticed a big increase in server stability. It helps us to isolate resources on an account basis.
Q: What do you have to say about LiteSpeed Web Server? As someone who has implemented it, how effectively does LiteSpeed replace Apache?
A: We really love using LiteSpeed here at eleven2. It was a big investment, as we have so many servers in our infrastructure, but it’s been well worth it. Our customers websites load static content 6x faster, compared to Apache. PHP also has had a 50% increase in performance.
Q: There were new developments and re-inventions in e2Panel a while back. Can you let us know more about the newly integrated ‘Real-time analytics’?
A: Last summer (2012), we actually re-designed the User Interface of our e2Panel. Then in October we got in contact with a lead live-analytics company called GoSquared. I personally went and paid them a visit, and met with the team to discuss how we could go about implementing real-time analytics into e2Panel, using GoSquared’s platform.
We began to play with their API to create some real cool real-time data, and quickly put a plan of action together. In December, we rolled out real-time analytics to all eleven2 customers. Customers just have to spend one minute linking a GoSquared account to their e2Panel, and voila, you can see a snapshot of what’s occurring live on your website, every time you login to e2Panel! 
Q: Tell our readers a bit about team eleven2?
A: We are an extremely strong team here at eleven2. Everyone enjoys working, and being part of the company. We do like to live by the phrase “Work hard, Play hard”. Our company never closes it’s doors either. 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year, we’re always open. You could even livechat or submit a ticket on Christmas day and our technicians will be here to help you.
Q: Our standard question to wrap things up, what’s in the bag for 2013?
A: I can’t really give too much away at this stage, but we are constantly looking for new ways to help customers. Our development team is always thinking up innovative ideas that make life easier for our clients. And our team in the lab is always hard at work developing new products. In Q2 of this year, we are launching a VPS range, along with an entirely brand new Cloud Infrastructure.
It’s not just changes in the hosting industry you need to take account for. We are effectively a “Web Based” company. We wouldn’t exist without the internet. Web trends and standards are moving so quickly. The mobile world is growing, more people are using smartphones than ever before. We are taking advantage of changes like this, by developing more mobile based hosting tools for our customer base.
And that’s just one example of how we’re adapting to change. We have a huge array of projects in the works, and our team here are always pushing for innovation.
