Eleven2 Offers High-End Business Hosting for SMBs with True Cloud Services at Affordable Prices

TL; DR: Eleven2 delivers a range of hosting services for businesses of all sizes, from shared to enterprise-grade options. Its innovative Cloud One product allows SMBs to experience a true cloud offering in a private datacenter at an affordable price. Although changes to the cPanel licensing model have disrupted the budget hosting market, Eleven2’s business focus has not been adversely affected. The company still provides easy customer journeys from shared hosting to more advanced solutions with no added migration costs.

Hosting providers that deliver shared and VPS hosting plans typically have dedicated server options. However, relatively few take on the added cost and complexity of developing a true cloud solution.

That’s where Eleven2, a veteran of the industry, distinguishes itself as a business hosting provider.

“Our biggest differentiator is we have a cloud product that’s actually a true cloud product,” said Steven Mizrahie, CEO of Eleven2. “That’s vastly different than what you see in the marketplace today. It’s fully redundant, replicated, in multiple datacenters with everything in real time.”

The company’s cloud service, Cloud One, offers 125 GB storage, 10 TB bandwidth, unlimited databases and domains, and a 100% uptime guarantee to provide business continuity. Eleven2 also has a global footprint and runs Cloud One at its datacenters in Los Angeles, Dallas, and Singapore.

Eleven2 also offers other hosting services, including shared hosting, virtual private servers, and enterprise-grade dedicated servers. The company also delivers robust support. It understands that many of its clients value its shared and reseller options, which can help them meet their ROI and growth goals.

“There’s huge value in both the shared space and the reseller space,” Steven said. “We offer flexible plans with generous allocations of disk space, bandwidth, and the other attributes which can help a site grow — from a stability standpoint. We also have backup services and other value-adds that others either don’t provide or they charge extra for.”

Some hosting providers deliberately conflate the terms cloud and VPS. A cloud-computing solution generally requires redundant servers to facilitate optimal transfer speed.

“When I see a ‘cloud’ that’s a $5 VPS, for which you pay for some CPU and memory, that’s not something that we associate with in terms of high-availability infrastructure,” Steven said.

The concept of high availability is central to cloud-based computing. A true cloud offers built-in redundancies and easy scaling. A cloud often has more than one machine in play. A VPS, on the other hand, is optimized for stand-alone applications or use cases.

For example, a small business may use a VPS for its online accounting software platform but relies on cloud services for general user storage. Having a VPS go offline can be an annoyance, but having a cloud services provider go down can be devastating.

Downtime is an even bigger problem if a vendor partner can’t or won’t respond to it quickly.

“One of our key selling points is that we have full control over all of our assets, unlike the vast majority of providers,” Steven said.

Eleven2 controls its Los Angeles datacenter, so the company doesn’t need to find a third-party management firm to intervene.

“You get remediation much faster,” Steven said. “You put in a ticket, but we generally already know about it because we monitor everything anyway, but we can touch your servers much faster than most other providers.”

Speed of resolution, or the average time it takes a customer service team to resolve a case after it’s been opened is important, especially when affected servers relate to revenue. Steven recounted one client that typically processed more than $70,000 per hour in sales and was breached because they hadn’t updated their WordPress platform.

“We had a backup restored in 10 minutes because of the platform we have available,” Steven said.

Over the last few years, the budget hosting industry has been rocked by changes to the pricing and license model of cPanel, the leading control panel for shared hosting environments. In 2019 cPanel decided to charge per account rather than per server, with incremental fees after 100 accounts on a server. It’s not uncommon for some servers to have 1,000 or more shared accounts, so that pricing approach significantly disrupted the economics of low-cost hosting.

“That cPanel adjustment totally changed the game for a lot of providers,” Steven said. “It definitely changed the budget and reseller space because now they went from an unlimited model where they weren’t looking at the total number of accounts on a server to you’re being billed per account. And that caused a lot of constriction in the marketplace. A lot of companies may have looked elsewhere for alternatives.”

Some providers have raised prices in line with cPanel, boosting costs by 200% or more. Others have either adopted alternative control panels or tried to program their own. However, Steven thinks that many clients don’t need the entire control-panel experience — they want to launch a few applications, including WordPress, and configure a handful of email accounts.

“I think we’re starting to see more of the Software-as-a-Service model kicking in,” he said. “A client just needs to log into an interface to launch a web app or create a couple of email addresses. But that’s the extent of what we see now.”

It’s too soon to tell what long-term impact the cPanel change will have on the budget hosting ecosystem, or even the VPS market. Still, regardless of how it shakes out, Eleven2 is prepared with new and higher tiers of service for customers who grow as their businesses evolve.

Eleven2 offers a full range of shared, VPS, and enterprise hosting — and it’s one of the relatively few that provide an authentic cloud product. Despite the confusion, a cloud provider supports clustered servers with redundancy and more robust backups. Eleven2 owns a datacenter in San Francisco and maintains a datacenter presence in Dallas, the Netherlands, and Singapore.

The license change for cPanel has significantly affected the budget side of the shared and VPS hosting market. Providers now follow different mitigation strategies, but shared hosting has become harder to maintain at the lower end of the cost spectrum. Steven said he believes that the cPanel shift suggests the long-term evolution, even at the budget end, will be toward SaaS platforms that deliver one-click apps with some basic email provisioning.

Regardless of how the future plays out, Eleven2 supports customers by offering a clear migration pathway as their needs grow more complex. It also ensures that all account types, including shared hosting, have the resources clients need. Eleven2 believes that charging an extra few dollars per month compared to budget hosts is well worth the peace of mind that comes from swift support responses because the hosting provider owns the underlying hardware.

The most important item on Eleven2’s internal development road map is the launch of its redesigned website and its ongoing fine-tuning. The new site clearly outlines the company’s philosophy and highlights the customer journey from shared to VPS to enterprise to multiserver cloud solutions.

“We want to be the all-in-one solution, a one-stop shop where you can start as a regular shared account, then grow into a VPS product, then to a dedicated product and a multiserver cluster,” Steven said. “That is huge because you can still have the same support that you’re accustomed to as your site grows, and we offer the platform to grow.”