How to differentiate yourself in the crowded service provider marketplace

The colocation and hosting marketplace is filled with an abundance of providers offering suites of different solutions to a rapidly growing consumer base of online and digital businesses. The challenge many service providers face is how to differentiate themselves and their services in an increasingly saturated market. Whilst the traditional elements of service offering, customer focus and pricing are critical in this market, forward thinking businesses are looking at ways to stand out from the crowd and high performance networks are coming top of the list. Having fit for purpose connectivity can enhance the service providers offering, through speed of site access, reliability and upgradeability, all benefits that can be instantly translated back to the customer.

Accessibility
Many hosting providers spend a lot of time focusing on what lies behind the data centre doors and very little time on how customers are connected to the hosting location. Those that are truly focused on customer service take an end-to-end view when it comes to the delivery of the services in question. Having a significant and scalable network from the data centre to an internet hub or customer site can be a major differentiator when the user experience is singularly focused on speed of access, but this is only part of the bigger picture.

Upgradeability
In a market where data volume has the potential to grow exponentially overnight, decoupling the cost of bandwidth from data growth should be one of the key mitigation activities both from service performance and financial perspectives. As customers demand rapidly scalable services, the traditional pay as you grow model can quickly become uneconomical for a service provider. The flexibility afforded by a dedicated fibre network can allow service providers to confidently scale up as and when customer requirements dictate, especially during peak traffic times.

Reliability
Reliability is all about ensuring continuous access for customers who demand an always-on approach; this is influenced by the physical network route and design. One way to ensure a higher level of security is to offer your customers a network that is routed away from everyday surface disruption. Using a private network infrastructure can guarantee higher levels of availability and speed in comparison to a shared network infrastructure where the service provider’s signal competes with hundreds of various other signals, adding another layer of complexity and delay to the process.

We asked Adam Smith, Managing Director of Tsohost, a shared hosting and managed dedicated service provider serving SME and individuals customers, to share his views on the importance of the network.

“Tsohost operates in an extremely competitive marketplace where commoditisation and market saturation have driven margins down. What this means is that our customers expect perfection even on our cheapest packages. They expect their website to be fast, all of the time. They expect 100% flawless reliability. As a managed service provider, it is our job to insulate customers from the technical aspects that make up their service; they manage the website, we take care of everything else. Therefore, our customers don't think in terms of connectivity, they think in terms of speed. If their websites are fast, they will be commercially successful. They rely on uptime and reliability to keep their online businesses moving. Being able to offer better speed than our competitors differentiates our offering and sets us apart from the competition.

The increasing prevalence of streaming media services, fuelled by popular video sharing websites such as YouTube, means that customers now require significantly more bandwidth than they did five years ago. They need to get data to their end users quickly, with low latency but also keep their costs low at the same time. Our aim is to exchange as much traffic as possible via public and private peering; direct connections to other ’eyeball’ ISPs which don't pass via IP transit, thus giving us a shorter route, lower latency and almost nil cost. This means that we need to have a strong network presence in the London Docklands. However, with space at a premium, it makes sense from a financial and logistical perspective to have our primary datacentres out of town. To achieve this, with the help of Geo, we have designed a fully diverse dark fibre ring linking our two data centre locations in Berkshire and our network PoPs in London Docklands. Each pair of fibres can handle multiple wavelengths giving us 'n' x 10G full duplex connectivity between sites. This topology affords us access to the multitude of Tier 1 transit providers and Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) available in London Docklands whilst we retain all the benefits (both financial and logistical) of an out of town data centre location.

To continue providing our high quality service, we need to ensure that we not only have adequate capacity for today's needs but that we future proof our network with capacity in reserve to scale up quickly in response to customer demand. This is why the connectivity we choose is so critical to our success.”

As the collocation and hosting industry continues to grow and a greater number of hybrid service providers enter the marketplace, existing providers will need to evolve to retain their year on year revenue growth. Differentiation will be crucial. Focusing on network connectivity is a sure-fire way to achieve this with private dark fibre infrastructure lending itself perfectly to resilient and secure data centre services and the always-on capabilities customers demand.