Founded in 2000, emerion WebHosting has grown to become a leading hosting and Internet service provider to small businesses and individuals in Europe. Founder and CEO Bernd Hilmar oversees the company’s operations from its base in Vienna, Austria.
As with thousands of other OpenSRS Resellers, emerion has been a customer since the beginning. Hilmar says that there were a couple of reasons they chose OpenSRS to power their domain registrations.
He notes that the fact that OpenSRS was one of the first Registrars to offer an API was very important. “We found OpenSRS [in 2000] and we were very impressed about the API because it allowed us to automate our domain registrations,” he says.
On Choosing a Registrar Partner
Of course, price was also a key consideration, but Hilmar says it shouldn’t be the top concern for those looking for a registrar partner. “Price is an important reason in this market, but it’s not the only reason to select a registrar,” he says. “It’s important for everything to work well day-to-day in this business.”
Hilmar says communication is also something to think about. He notes that he enjoys the level of communication that OpenSRS provides both through email messages that keep him informed of what’s new and also through regular contact with his account manager, Luigi Lagonigro, who works out of the OpenSRS office in the UK.
From a service availability standpoint, Hilmar says he likes the way OpenSRS keeps him informed of what’s going on. “[OpenSRS] has a status page so we can see by ourselves when something happens, and when it will be resolved,” he says. This allows emerion to more quickly react to, and minimize, any potential impacts on its customer base when service interruptions take place.
This focus on good communication is a philosophy that the company embraces for its own interactions with customers.
Emerion Embraces Social Media
Hilmar says the company is using both Facebook and Twitter to network with current and potential customers. With its Facebook page, emerion has attracted well over 1,500 fans already.
They use social media primarily to keep their customers informed. “We update the community with hosting news and provide them with an inside view of the inner workings of their hosting provider,” he says. But he cautions that too much information can have a negative effect, adding that “people can get angry about it” if you communicate too much.
As for the future, Hilmar says they’re just getting started in the social media space. “There are many ways to use social media. We will do more in future because we believe in the dynamic of the social interactivity,” he says.
A Beneficial Mix of Both Business and Personal Accounts
Emerion’s customer base ranges from personal shared hosting accounts to businesses with more advanced needs. He says having both types of customers allows them to better tailor their systems and provide better service to everyone.
“Honestly, we need both,” he says. “It’s interesting to work with the private customers because it’s an advantage to make the service easy to use for them and to improve the usability.”
But on the business customer side, Hilmar says the customers are often more demanding. “The business customer has more and special needs,” he says. “They want specific things and we improve our service with that needs and try to implement it as standard.”
Emerion welcomes both because they find the mix to be beneficial. “We try to cover both directions because at the end they both fit together very good,” he says. From his experience, servicing both types of customers helps improve the offering overall.
Emerion’s Custom Cloud Solution
Emerion has deployed a custom, clustered server system, which is a cloud,
and offers burstable resources for customers. It provides this in conjunction with a hosting control panel it developed in-house for an end-to-end system.
Hilmar says they decided to opt for a custom solution because it allows them to better serve their customers. “We wrote the software for our hosting control panel all by ourselves and it works together with our own system. Nothing else fit the specific needs of our customers,” he says.
He adds that it allows for more flexibility in providing an easy to use service. “With out own system we are more independent to do interfaces for our customers. It allows us to make it easier for our customers.”
That focus on “ease of use” and a commitment to providing a high level of customer service will no doubt serve the company well as it continues to grow.
Special thanks goes to Heather Leson who did a ton of work on this profile and also to our European office for facilitating a face-to-face interview with Bernd Hilmar at WebhostingDay last week. And of course, special thanks goes to Bernd for taking the time to meet with us and answer all of our many questions. We appreciate it!
Tags: Meet the Resellers