Interviewed on 29 Apr 09
Kate Craig-Wood, Managing Director
Memset Ltd provides fully managed server hosting with a dedication to support, peace of mind and protection.
Memset are an authorised Red Hat Partner aswell as supporting a huge variety of open source operating systems, applications and configurations. We also are a Microsoft SPLA Partner so we can provide all Microsoft Software to customers on a rental basis. We only use Dell Hardware to ensure reliability and we have an excellent reputation for building bespoke Linux server solutions to customers specifications.
Memset is privately owned, privately funded and has had stable organic growth with no debts. This means that we can move quickly to changes in the market and offer support for more individual customer needs which may not necessarily be on the “price list”.
What unique selling points do you offer?
We offer the ability to build your own server from scratch unlike other hosting companies who offer the old Bronze, Silver and Gold Options. So you only pay for what you need. We also take corporate responsibility very seriously and I believe were the first Hosting company in the UK to gain Carbon Neutral Accreditation in August and ISO9001 in September. Also over 80% of our new business comes from referalls so we must be doing something right.
Describe the services you offer?
Virtual Servers, Dedicated Servers, Reseller Hosting (either virtual or dedicated).
Describe your target market?
We don't really have a “target” market as such, anyone with a Hosting requirement could be a target. We have however naturally evolved into having the large majority of our customers running quite individual Linux Hosting requirements. These range from mobile phone location Software, E-Mail to PDA/Handhelds and also quite a few customers with Windows database servers and Linux front ends. They come to us because we can help support quite complex requirements.
How is your company planning for the future?
We are constantly developing our products and services. In the medium term I intend to move into the utility computing market; selling resources on-demand rather than renting individual machines. How this will work is we shall have a large generic pool of hardware with our customers' applications able to expand and contract across the available hardware in response to demand changes. We plan to use a mixture of our existing virtualisation expertise and some in-house developments to make this a reality. This will have significant cost savings and resilience improvements for our customers, and will improve our energy efficiency further still.
What benefits can you offer your customers?
The fact that they can build a server to their own specification, our value for money, everyone in the company has an average of eight years in their related field. I also think we are upfront, honest and reliable.
How do you support your customers?
We offer various support levels and services from basic to fully managed. This can include the installation and management of standard software packages, troubleshooting and configuration of such applications as PHP, Apache and mySQL. Vulnerability Assessment scans, Fully Managed Firewalls, Server Hack recovery, Load balancing and failover technologies.
