Helping Virtuozzo’s customers grow with customized infrastructure

From the very beginning, Virtuozzo has built its products with service providers in mind.

Traditionally a software development company that focuses on hosting and cloud software solutions for service providers, today it is a one-stop-shop for everything service providers need to build a cloud business.

“Our aim is to make it as simple as possible for service providers to build and grow their businesses. That means offering solutions-as-a-service, aggressive pricing models and freedom to use whatever hardware or infrastructure best works for them. It’s why we have a strong commitment to open source and products that don’t lead to lock in. We want to help service providers go to market faster and reduce time to revenue,” said Joe Morgan, VP of cloud at Virtuozzo.

“Even our contracts are structured so that we grow when our customers grow, and our pricing model is designed around the idea that our customers are going to be reselling these services. Customers pay for what they use, not per CPU socket. And if they have infrastructure that they are not using, our software can sit on top and allow them to use that infrastructure for something else.”

This flexibility that Virtuozzo offers its customers has to be reflected by any partner it chooses to work with.

“Our partnership with servers.com is a mutually beneficial one. We offer servers.com infrastructure direct to our end customers, use it for our hosting side of the business and for our own internal needs, like product testing.”

The challenge

One of Virtuozzo’s biggest differentiators is that it can provide its customers with a custom set of features and products for their particular use case, such as those that want to run clustered deployments. However, Virtuozzo found it difficult to source servers with the specific network and storage configurations it was looking for.

“We had requirements for throughput and compatibility that other providers simply couldn’t meet – but servers.com was willing to work with us to create the hardware configurations we needed,” said Joe.

Virtuozzo also wanted to work with a partner that would go beyond simply just deploying a server.

“I know from getting prices and quotes in this industry that servers.com offers a more “managed” unmanaged bare metal hosting service than others. Many other providers don’t want to get involved in things like operating system installation or even some of the most basic tasks that allow us to get access to the server to do the configuration we need. We’ve even had providers tell us that it’s up to us to figure out how to use the hardware,” Joe adds.

The solution

“We have used servers.com for several years but we ramped up our partnership because of their ability to deploy a whole bunch of servers in a short period of time. Servers that run the custom networking vLAN configuration set up which is necessary for us to run our software. They also make it very easy for us to manage what is a pretty complex set up. In the servers.com web portal, we can manage our vLANs, IPs, view our networking information and usage graphs,” said James Withall, VP of IT at Virtuozzo.

“If we’d gone to some of the biggest guys in the industry, they wouldn’t talk to us about custom stuff because they don’t care. If we go to the small niche players, they don’t have the ability to work at the volume we need. servers.com sits in the middle, where they do custom at great prices and are willing to work collaboratively with us. For example - we have a challenge around performance, can we test out this server? The answer was yes, of course. If we went to another provider with that question, they would want us to commit to three or six months or a year with that server, just for us to do some testing and realise the configuration is no better than what we had before. The personal level of working that we have with servers.com is super important to us,” said Joe.

“It’s rare to hear from other members of the team how refreshing it is to work with another company. We have an open line of communication with servers.com where we can ask questions back and forth rather than submit a support ticket every time. It’s an open dialogue where we can talk about business needs and work together to figure out the best solution for us. We do have general support ticket needs that we have to submit from time and time and servers.com has been very quick to respond.

“servers.com’s competitive pricing is also a key reason why we choose to work with them. We had a project recently where we needed to let an external company test our software. We rented some servers from servers.com on a short lease to give the external company a dedicated environment to do their testing. Had we had to go out and buy co-location or physical servers for that testing, it would have been a huge CAPEX investment and come with long-term commitment contracts. We were able to avoid all of this because servers.com gives us a lot of flexibility in how we buy infrastructure from them.”

For Virtuozzo, that flexibility also needs to come with consistency of service to ensure their customers (service providers) can maintain reliability for their own customers.

“With servers.com’s certified data centers in multiple locations around the world, we know that we can get the hosting services we need in these different regions, and it will be the same quality and always meet our configuration expectations,” said James.