An Extension of Your IT Staff: How Admin-Ahead Helps Hosting Providers and Enterprises Support and Maintain Their Infrastructure

TL; DR: If you’re looking to augment your in-house IT team without drastically increasing overhead, Admin-Ahead, which helps businesses maintain their infrastructure in an affordable, flexible way, may be your solution. Through a consultative, proactive approach, the company provides IT support, server management, and a broad selection of extensions and plugins. With a close-knit company culture and a focus on sustaining customer relationships, Admin-Ahead is committed to prioritizing the customer experience.

As anyone who’s ever worked as a waiter or cashier knows, customer service is one of the most punishing jobs around. Add in the challenges inherent in a globalized workplace — language barriers, time differences, and varying cultural norms — and the prospect of delivering high-quality support becomes even more grueling.

While some companies wither in the face of these seemingly insurmountable obstacles, others rise to the challenge. Admin-Ahead, a hosting support and server management organization that serves as an extension of your IT staff, is undoubtedly in the latter category. Based in India, the company serves customers worldwide — many of whom are non-English speakers — yet refuses to let geographical barriers get in the way of outstanding support.

“We always try to take a proactive approach to resolve problems before customers reach out to us,” said Jisha Ashok, Business Development Manager at Admin-Ahead. “If problems do occur, our customers are free to express themselves to us. We sit together and work things out, even if we need to communicate through translators.”

But the company doesn’t stop there. Jisha told us Admin-Ahead’s goal is to form personal relationships with clients by acknowledging them holistically as individuals. “We enjoy taking the time to speak with them about their lives outside of work,” she said. “We want them to know they can trust us.”

It’s an impressive feat considering that the company currently serves more than 4,500 customers worldwide — and maintains close relationships with the majority of them. Ultimately, Admin-Ahead’s flexible, customer-centric approach allows the company to work seamlessly with businesses as an extension of their IT teams. Add in a portfolio of IT support services, server management tools, and a wide range of extensions and plugins, and the company has everything it needs to create the ideal customer experience.

Founded in 2004 by Nikhil Thomas, Admin-Ahead quickly grew from a small staff of five into a flourishing business. By the time Jisha joined the company as a quality manager in 2011, she said there were more than 60 employees on staff.

Soon after that, Admin-Ahead became a subsidiary of BrookWin Technology Solutions, a provider of outsourced technical support, web design, software development, and customized CRM solutions. BrookWin now presides over Admin-Ahead as well as Infinite Calls, a video, audio, and live chat platform currently in beta.

Jisha said Admin-Ahead has a robust research and development team that works to drive the company’s technology forward, while its customer satisfaction team ensures a seamless experience starting with a free consultation. “Our goal is to make things easy for our customers,” she said. “We suggest the products they need along with our support service in one solution, so customers don’t need to seek help from outside sources.”

The company offers a range of professional and reliable support services on a per-task basis, including hourly server support, setup, security audits, disaster recovery, data migration, and service optimization. Customers can also sign up for a flexible security monitoring plan for Linux and Windows, and a PCI compliance program.

In addition, Admin-Ahead provides dedicated, semi-dedicated, and shared support plans that vary based on coverage periods and support channels. Finally, the company’s server management plans offer security updates, server optimization, AWS cloud service, comprehensive monitoring, and Windows server security and hardening options.

Admin-Ahead’s research and development team is also responsible for the company’s wide range of plugins, which are intended to make the lives of customers as easy as possible. Jisha told us Admin-Ahead initially focused on providing plugins for cPanel, the most widespread application for managing hosted sites.

The company saw immediate success with the beta release of its first APF cPanel plugin and never looked back. “That’s when we realized the opportunity we had with plugins and started developing solutions customers were looking for,” Jisha said. “We were the first to come up with 13 such products, though we now have competitors, of course.”

Today, the company offers a range of cPanel plugins focused on security and automation, as well as a variety of Plesk extensions — most of which cost fewer than $6 per month. The company also offers a few free products, including a Unified FFMPEG Installer, Let’s Encrypt Manager for cPanel, and APF interface for cPanel.

Jisha told us her favorite product is the company’s gDNS Cluster, a server-side script solution.

“The gDNS is a cross-control panel, cross-platform clustering solution that allows users to add failover controllers,” she said. “The cPanel and Plesk plugins are for the normal web host — even a VPS provider can use it. The gDNS cluster caters the enterprise level. gDNS has enabled our customer to integrate more than a thousand servers into a single cluster with perfect ease, be it cPanel, Plesk or Windows servers.”

Jisha said Admin-Ahead prioritizes the quality of its client relationships over the size of its consumer base. “Our focus is on keeping current customers happy rather than always trying to find new business,” she said. “Because of this, we have been able to sustain more clients.”

The first day a client signs up, he or she will receive a welcoming phone call from the company. “We help the customer resolve any problems they face before signing on with us,” Jisha said. “We don’t want an issue to escalate, so we approach everything with caution.”

Kevin Morrison of COG Hosting shared his experience with the company in a review on the Admin-Ahead site. “It is difficult in this day and age to find anyone who offers good support, let alone great support, and I have to say the Admin-Ahead team went beyond even that and gave me fantastic support,” he said. “You guys deserve every one of the stars I just turned gold.”

Another reviewer, Nick Mariani of NectarTech, LLC, said his company has worked with Admin-Ahead for more than nine years. In that time, he’s experienced courteous customer service, prompt resolution times, and enthusiastic support via multiple communication channels.

“Admin-Ahead’s techs are great,” Nick said. “They are not only fast, but quick to figure out why something is not working. They fix the problem quickly, minimizing downtime.”

Studies now prove what many of us have suspected for a long time: Happy employees provide better customer service. Jisha told us Admin-Ahead keeps its 60-person team engaged by fostering a family-like environment in which employees work, play, and eat together.

To inject a little energy into the workplace, the company recently sponsored an athletic competition complete with jerseys bearing the names of each employee and prizes for the winning teams. “Everone was so excited and eager to win,” Jisha said. “Being a 24/7 company, we all know each other, and yes, we have fun.”

In the future, Jisha said Admin-Ahead hopes to share its enthusiasm for a job well done with an even wider global audience. “We would like the world to know us,” she said. Considering the company’s experience serving global markets, we think this is an achievable goal.