CEO Dennis Nind on Brixly — A Fast-Growing, UK-Based Hosting Platform Dedicated to Providing Unlimited Reseller and Cloud Solutions

TL; DR: Brixly, a fast-growing hosting provider dedicated to offering a great service to resellers and end users alike, has delivered high-performance solutions to SMBs and enterprises since 2014. Owned and operated in the UK, Brixly has leveraged its team’s vast experience to build a powerful yet reliable hosting platform backed by around-the-clock support. With unlimited web hosting, powerful virtual and dedicated servers, and its latest innovation — the Elastic Cloud — the company continues to deliver flexible solutions suitable for any client need.

We’ve heard it a million times: The most astute business owners put themselves in their customers’ shoes. This practice, however, is an exercise in futility unless you gain insight through real-world experience. To design a genuinely customer-centric product or service, you can’t just imagine how your customers might feel — you have to know what it’s like to walk in their footsteps, blisters and all.

The team behind Brixly, a provider of one of the UK’s fastest-growing hosting platforms for the reseller market, knows precisely what its customers want — because they’ve been on the receiving end of the services they now provide. More than a decade ago, CEO Dennis Nind began providing web design and development services to a range of clients. As his client base grew, it became clear that Dennis needed to add hosting to his package of offerings. So, he turned to reseller services.

“I started as a design and development business looking for a way to sell web hosting to my customers in order to build long-lasting relationships with my client base,” Dennis said. “When we went down the reseller route, we found a gap in the market — the products were fine, but we knew we could improve upon them.”

The team gradually tested a handful of reseller companies, discovering that each had its flaws. Using what they’d learned, the company phased out its web design arm and began to focus on providing its own hosting services based on what others were lacking. Over the last four or more years, Brixly has gradually built out its own infrastructure, ranging from standard website hosting to dedicated hardware.

“We are proud hosting providers supporting a large number of websites and businesses with customers in over 75 countries,” Dennis said. “Our main services and products are still tailored for the reseller market enabling design agencies, freelancers, and web developers a fantastic way of building and developing long-term relationships with their clients by proudly providing a service that’s reliable and robust. Of course, reseller hosting isn’t just for these clients; it’s an incredibly secure way of hosting multiple sites for bloggers and web-hosting enthusiasts. We also sell all of the other hosting products that you would expect to see for both the B2B and B2C market.”

In addition to cutting-edge reseller options, those products include unlimited web hosting, WordPress hosting plans, Windows hosting, virtual and dedicated servers, and the company’s new Elastic Cloud infrastructure.

Dennis told us Brixly’s unlimited reseller hosting is an ideal solution for someone like his former self — a web designer looking to offer clients a comprehensive design and hosting solution (or for anyone wanting to start out in the hosting industry).

“We’ve always provided a great level of focus on our resellers to ensure our range of products is an ideal companion for their growing businesses,” Dennis said. “It’s of my opinion that you should only offer your clients something on a resale basis if you would be proud to call it ‘your own’ – this is the aim here, and is one of the reasons we allow our resellers to completely white-label our services under their own brand. The progression and development of our products have been driven by customer feedback, opinion, and first-hand experience — if our clients require something specific, it’s extremely likely we can provide a tailored solution.”

In addition to design agencies, reseller hosting is suitable for providers who are new to the hosting industry as well as those consolidating existing clients under one account. Brixly’s reseller hosting comes with complete control through cPanel, making it extremely easy to use. What’s more, Brixly’s Reseller Pro account — available for 19.50 euros a month — doesn’t impose limits on reseller accounts, allowing users to host an unlimited number of clients without restrictions on bandwidth or disk usage. Those looking for access to 10 accounts with a 20GB storage limit should opt for Brixly’s Reseller Entry plan, available for just 8.95 euros per month.

Brixly has carved a niche for itself in a saturated reseller market by prioritizing performance. “You see so many people nowadays jump straight into the hosting business, and that’s so difficult because it’s such a competitive industry,” Dennis said. “You need something to make you stand out, so we’ve always focused on performance and customer service.”

To enhance performance, Brixly uses a unique configuration with Nginx as a reverse proxy to Apache and speeds up PHP sites through a module based on the LiteSpeed Technologies API. No additional knowledge is required to use the account — the only difference is a huge boost in site speed and performance.

Brixly’s website hosting plans include unlimited SSD storage and bandwidth, with five free domains on the Infinity Cloud plan (3.95 euros per month) and unlimited hosted domains with the Infinity + plan (8.95 euros a month). All plans are powered by cPanel and feature a range of perks, including a free website builder, self-renewing SSL certificates, and standard daily backups.

Dennis told us Brixly has always focused on adding a range of new features, because “high-performance hosting only gets you so far in such a competitive industry,” Dennis said. “It’s key to offer something that other providers can’t.”

To that end, the company built its Managed WordPress Hosting Platform with ease-of-use in mind. Intuitive features include one-click installations, automatic hourly backups, straightforward site cloning, and a centralized management dashboard.

“We have been offering more and more functionality within the hosting we have,” Dennis said. “We started with fairly basic cPanel hosting and then built add-ons and bespoke plugins to improve things. The features are all-purpose; built and designed to improve and simplify the day-to-day management of any site or business.”

Dennis said the needs of his reseller customers often evolve to the point where a virtual or dedicated solution is warranted. Powered by 100% RAID 10 SSD, Brixly’s scalable virtual private servers feature a 99.99% uptime guarantee, instant cPanel or Plesk installations, and 24/7 expert management at no extra charge. Proactive monitoring is also available; for 14.95 euros, Brixly will add your server to its advanced monitoring system, which works to put a stop to potential issues before they occur.

For those in need of unparalleled power and even more control, Brixly’s enterprise-quality dedicated servers are just the ticket. All dedicated servers hosted in the company’s UK-based datacenter are fully customizable and backed by a 100% uptime service level agreement, integrated power distribution, and multi-layered physical security.

Any parent of a small child knows how hard it is to function in the midst of chronic sleep deprivation. The symptoms are brutal: brain fog, irritability, bloodshot eyes, quasi-hallucinations. Now imagine taking on a full-time customer support role simultaneously. That’s exactly what Dennis did to keep customers happy during Brixly’s infancy — and with serious grit and determination, he succeeded.

“When you first start offering hosting, I will be the first to admit it’s difficult,” Dennis said. “I have a wife and children and didn’t have the financial backing to pay for a team of support guys without knowing whether or not the business would succeed. My assumption was that if I focused on building a reliable, secure, and robust hosting platform, I could cope with technical support alone. Since it was an industry standard to offer 24/7 support, I pretty much just slept on my phone for the first few months!”

Today, the company consists of a talented and passionate team of nine, all of which are technical support staff. The business has no dedicated sales team, so each member is entirely familiar with all aspects of the platform. The majority of which are cPanel-certified engineers and Tier III systems administrators.

“The majority of the team have been with us for some time now,” Dennis said. “Whilst they are put under some strain in terms of support and quality expectations, each and every day brings exciting new challenges, which has led to an incredible set of knowledge and experience. Our customers are an absolute pleasure to deal with day in and day out, so it’s great building partnerships with them and passing that knowledge on. We have been especially strict in terms of response times, quality, and keeping on top of feedback. We get a large number of support tickets and inquiries a day, with an average response time of around 14 minutes. That’s pretty impressive if I may say so myself!”

But speed means nothing if a problem isn’t properly solved. Fortunately for Brixly customers, internal help desk audits have shown that customer service agents resolve 82% of all opened tickets on their first attempt.

Brixly’s latest innovation, the Elastic Cloud, offers the simplicity of cPanel with a 100% uptime guarantee achieved through failover technology.

“Although cPanel is widely adopted, one downside that we’ve always noticed — and it’s still a common downside today — is that it doesn’t offer any high availability solutions or failover,” Dennis said.

Dennis told us the Elastic Cloud consists of a master cPanel server where data is replicated between multiple machines. “If one of those machines stop responding, the other one takes over,” he said. “It’s basically load-balanced, but via DNS. It’s an incredible setup, and it essentially means that we are one of the first providers able to offer high-availability cPanel hosting, which is ideal for enterprise hosting and busy blogs or sites.”

The Elastic Cloud makes server updates and maintenance a breeze. “Every server needs to be updated at some point,” Dennis said. “With the Elastic Cloud, you can essentially take one machine offline and run maintenance on it while the rest of the sites carry on.”

And, in a world where the average hourly cost of enterprise server downtime can be as high as $301,000 to $400,000 US dollars, high availability through the Elastic Cloud is quite the advantage.

The Brixly team can personally vouch for its effectiveness. “There’s nothing worse than trying to optimize a product that you haven’t already tested,” Dennis said. ”We hosted our own site on the Elastic Cloud platform for 12 months before we released it as a product to make sure it worked,” Dennis said.

When it comes to standing in your client’s shoes, we think 12 months is more than enough time to gain some real-world insight.