This latest installment in the “Meet the Resellers” series features Jonathan Brealey from UK hosting company Heart Internet. Check out their blog, too!

Jonathan Brealey, Heart Internet

James McNally (JM): How long has Heart Internet been doing business and what are all the services you offer to your customers?

Jonathan Brealey (JB): Tim Beresford and I have been involved in the UK web hosting and domain name registration market for just over twelve years now. We first launched WebFusion in 1997 and 123-reg followed in 2000. Having built up these brands, we decided to look for our next challenge and in 2004 we launched Heart Internet.

Since day one the focus has always been on highly automated systems which empower our customers, as well as allow us to reduce prices significantly and then provide back up through small teams of high quality employees. Our primary focus is on the reseller and shared hosting markets; however, we have recently launched our range of dedicated servers which have been really popular.

JM: Any interesting stories from your company’s history?

JB: Heart Internet has quickly become of one of the most respected names in web hosting in the UK, and when you are growing as fast as we have you are constantly running out of space. For the first four years after we launched we moved to new premises double the size of the existing ones every year! Last year, we had finally had enough of doing that, so we are now in new offices that are three times bigger than our last!

JM: How did you personally get into the Internet business?

JB: In the summer of 1997, I was running a website and the web hosting company I was using were really technical. I remember thinking that whilst I was happy to use the service, many businesses would struggle. So we launched WebFusion and from the very early days we wrote our own control panels to allow customers to manage their own features. Our message was that we were business-friendly.

JM: Where are you located and what makes it such a great place to do business?

JB: We are based in Nottingham in the UK. Nottingham is a big university city with two large and well-respected universities on our doorstep who just keep on turning out skilled graduates in the fields we need.

JM: How long have you been an OpenSRS Reseller and how has your partnership with OpenSRS helped your company succeed?

JB: We originally opened our OpenSRS account with WebFusion in 1999 and it was the strong API that attracted us. OpenSRS allowed us to offer real-time domain name registration whilst most companies were still doing it manually; this helped us to keep our prices down and offer a fast service.

JM: Any other suggestions or feedback for us?

JB: We respect technical innovation and see it as key driver for our business. Further automation and minimising errors on things like domain transfers are important for us. Overall, It’s been great working with all the guys over the last nine years and we look forward to many more years!

If you’re a reseller interested in sharing your story with our readers, get in touch with me (jamesmATopensrsDOTcom). We’d love to hear from you!