Written by: Laura Bernheim
Edited by: Lillian Castro
TL; DR: Despite being a young company, IO Zoom and CEO Kiet Duong bring technical expertise and attention to customer experiences beyond their years. The Houston-based company concentrates on high-speed virtual private servers offered at surprisingly affordable rates. Featuring proactive managed support and seamless migrations, IO Zoom is now embarking on a mission to enable developers, online marketers, and entrepreneurs to resell fluid virtual environments to clients around the world. Next on the IO Zoom docket? Building up its new WordPress services and expanding its cloud network to Europe and Asia.
Even though most web hosting customers associate low prices with watered-down and beginner-friendly services, IO Zoom bucks the trend with forward-thinking virtual private servers that emphasize performance and high availability.
Starting as low as $5 per month — on par with many respectable shared hosting providers — IO Zoom’s cloud VPS packages are geared toward internet professionals, developers, and digital marketers, and include lightning-fast solid-state drives, free DDoS protection, and a 100% hardware, network, and infrastructure uptime guarantee.
“If you look at our plans and prices, I’d say we’re a low-cost provider,” said CEO and Founder Kiet Duong. “When you add on the management portion of it, we’re super low-cost when looking at other managed services.”
Compared with well-known, developer-oriented cloud hosting experts like Digital Ocean and Linode, Kiet said IO Zoom offers a quicker route to online success with optimized, SSD-driven performance and more user-friendly managed services.
“It’s really easy with us,” he said. “If you have a control panel, you’re pretty much online. There’s a lot more self-management going on elsewhere, and we’re faster both in terms of getting started and general performance. The digital professionals we aim to help will get online quicker and not have to spend as much time on management.”
Proactive Server Management and Hands-Off Migrations
Although IO Zoom allows experienced site owners and developers to self-manage their hosting environments if they choose, the company includes fully managed services for free when a customer simply chooses a plan with cPanel or Plesk.
In addition to the operating system installation and hardware and network administration, fully managed service includes server hardening, control panel updates, malware scans, backups configuration, and best-effort support for third-party scripts.
IO Zoom largely delivers managed services and free migrations through cPanel and Plesk.
For those who opt to invest an additional $8 per month, IO Zoom goes even further with proactive services such as monitoring and updates to the kernel, security, and operating system.
“You’re hands off,” he said. “We’ll do full updates, and you don’t even have to contact us about anything. When we’re about to work on something, we’ll let you know. We’re big on doing those things for our customers.”
The first step IO Zoom takes for new customers typically involves migrating their website or application files to the company’s infrastructure, which is spread across datacenters in Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Miami, New Jersey, and Amsterdam.
“If you’re moving over here from something that’s not cPanel or Plesk and there’s not a migration tool for it, we’ll manually transfer things over, no problem,” Kiet said. “We make it really easy for people to migrate.”
Empowering VPS Resellers to Set Their Own Plans and Prices
Given its prowess in Linux, Windows, and cloud VPS offerings, IO Zoom recently launched VPS reseller accounts to further appeal to the company’s client base of developers and web professionals — empowering them to quickly spin up and manage high-powered environments for their own clients.
“VPS reseller isn’t something that’s widely offered by others at the moment,” Kiet said. “Reseller hosting is so limited at the moment. We really haven’t marketed it too much, so we’re just seeing where we’re going to go with it.”
In addition to the affordable rates found elsewhere in the company’s services, customers of IO Zoom’s VPS reseller plans enjoy the completely white-labeled product — end users will not find an IO Zoom logo or reference on either the servers or on IP address lookup.
“A lot of people, when it comes to offering reseller plans for VPS, they’re pretty much reselling that company’s own plans,” Kiet said. “This allows you to set your own custom plans and take full ownership.”
Developers and agencies can quickly spin up and manage VPS environments for clients through IO Zoom.
As is the case with other IO Zoom products, value is a signature component built into the reseller VPS platform. The three tiers provide ample resources — ranging from 30GB to 90GB of SSD storage, for instance — that the reseller can divvy up as needed across the allotted number of VPS accounts. The KVM-R 3GB plan costs $20 per month and allows for five customers; at the other end of the spectrum, the KVM-R 9GB offering covers up to 15 accounts for $60 per month. The $4-per-account price leaves plenty of room for resellers to turn a profit, Kiet said.
“Reselling VPS services can be a profitable line of business for many IT providers, web and software developers, internet marketers, and many others,” he said in the company’s press release. “This service allows you to focus on your core business while letting us do the heavy lifting of setting up and running the VPS infrastructure. We build it. You profit from it.”
IO Zoom Dips Into Optimized WordPress Hosting
Taking a step away from the company’s main focus of VPS environments, IO Zoom has also begun exploring the world of managed WordPress hosting. The service is available in both high-availability cloud and optimized VPS formats.
“Most of our business is VPS, so our audience is mostly internet professionals, digital marketers, and people like that,” Kiet said. “Our WordPress-styled hosting service is more targeted toward small and medium businesses.
The VPS version of IO Zoom’s WordPress plans comes with free daily backups, DDoS protection, and cPanel/WHM. The included cPanel license unlocks the company’s fully managed services, which include server security and best-effort support for the popular content management system.
In addition to the SSD RAID-10 storage configuration, IO Zoom optimizes WordPress page loads by using NGINX and a fine-tuned MySQL and .htaccess file, along with PHP accelerator Opcache and caching plugins Memcached and Varnish.
Crafted for SMBs, IO Zoom’s cloud WordPress plans include an impressive array of features.
Prices for VPS WordPress plans range from $24 to $136 per month, while the cloud versions of the specialized hosting service fall between $5 and $29 monthly. Beyond emphasizing affordability, IO Zoom’s cloud WordPress hosting delivers staging and cloning functionality, LiteSpeed web servers and caching, and consolidated oversight of multiple WordPress installations.
On the Horizon: Expanding IO Zoom’s Cloud Presence in Europe and Asia
Even with so many new and promising additions to his company’s product portfolio, Kiet is looking to keep the momentum rolling at IO Zoom.
In March, the company entered the European hosting market by starting a presence in a datacenter in Meppel, near Amsterdam. IO Zoom started by offering Windows VPS plans, with high-availability cloud services starting overseas a few months later.
The IO Zoom cloud service includes real-time data replication across multiple servers to prevent downtime caused by hardware failures. Intelligent traffic routing via Noction reduces latency by an average of 24%, and customers can enjoy standard cloud features such as hourly billing and on-demand scaling.
“You don’t have to migrate or anything,” Kiet said. “It’s seamless and based on each individual resource instead of moving to another tier of a VPS plan. You can add or remove the exact resources you need.”
Already with a strong U.S. presence and a promising start in the European market, Kiet told us he’s expecting IO Zoom to broaden its cloud in Europe with a possible London datacenter, along with extending into Asia through a possible location in Singapore.
“The only thing we’re focused on at the moment is expanding our cloud,” he said. “That’s pretty much our road map for the next year or so.”
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