NextPointHost’s High-Availability Cloud Solutions: Crafted with Care to Serve a Variety of Users, From Resellers to Financial Traders

TL; DR: With years of experience providing cloud solutions to businesses of all sizes, NextPointHost has learned just how to balance high-quality hosting services with affordable price points. The company offers a range of shared, virtual, and cloud servers, plus Forex VPS hosting tailored to the needs of today’s finance professionals. NextPointHost’s user-centric approach to product development and detail-oriented support is helping approximately 100,000 clients in more than 80 countries find their internet sweet spot.

For those of us who grew up frightened by our grandparents’ tales of the Great Depression, the Great Recession of 2007 was unsettling, to say the least. We watched, helplessly, as the housing bubble burst, gas prices shot up, and layoffs rained down.

Well, some of us did. Others, like NextPointHost Founder Genko Penev, saw opportunity within chaos.

He observed many IT companies going bankrupt, cutting their research and design budgets, and reducing staff. “At the time, I was a computer networking and virtualization instructor with a deep interest in new technologies,” he said. “IT companies were offering low-quality services at the lowest possible prices because they didn’t have money to improve their infrastructure.”

Genko decided to do the opposite: Offer reliable, high-quality cloud hosting services at reasonable prices. “I used the latest state-of-the-art virtualization technologies to create our dedicated cloud servers,” he said.

At the time, Genko said there was a great deal of skepticism surrounding cloud services. “No one believed in them until they used the services and began to understand that they were the future,” he said. “Dedicated cloud servers have the same stability, performance, and security levels as physical dedicated servers at a lower cost.”

Higher-quality services at lower price points were just what recession-era businesses needed. “In this way, our premium services helped clients increase business growth,” he said.

Today, NextPointHost is a one-stop shop for robust, reliable hosting solutions, including shared, virtual, and cloud servers, as well as Forex VPS hosting designed specifically for financial service professionals. The company is committed to reliability, boasting a 99.9999% uptime guarantee and knowledgeable, around-the-clock support. Now serving more than 100,000 clients in 80 countries, NextPointHost is prepared to lead its customers through whatever the future holds.

The company’s overarching goal is simple — to keep clients up and running as long as possible. “No client likes service interruptions — from the client’s point of view, the service must always work, no matter what happens with electricity, internet connectivity, server hardware, etc.,” Genko said.

NextPointHost’s datacenters are all Tier 4, with fully redundant power, storage, chillers, HVAC systems, and network links. The robust infrastructure allows the company to guarantee an impressive 99.9999% network availability in any given calendar month — a supreme uptime rate that beats the “five nines” standard many hosting experts recommend. If NextPointHost falls short of that guarantee, the customer may request a credit of up to 100% of the fee for capacity used during the previous month.

Genko told us he steers clear of 100% availability guarantees in the name of honesty. “Anyone who has dealt in depth with the construction of high-availability systems knows that 100% availability is impossible,” he said. “The best systems for redundancy need time to react and switch from the failed system to the running system.”

NextPointHost also safeguards customers in terms of security, specifically minimizing the possibility of a single account on a shared server affecting the security and performance of the entire server.

“This is achieved by creating an extremely efficient security environment on the servers through mechanisms where each user is limited to their own space,” Genko said. “Thus, even if there is a single account with a security vulnerability, the other users on the server cannot be attacked.”

Once wary of fintech, the financial services industry has begun to embrace technological advancements as the recession fades in its rearview mirror. In 2014, the value of fintech investments across the globe reached a hefty $10 billion.

With virtual private servers designed specifically for financial trading purposes, NextPointHost is decidedly ahead of this trend. Genko told us the company was the first provider to serve this niche — and thus the most experienced.

“Our Forex servers help traders earn more,” he said. “Our lightning-fast cross-connection links with all major European Forex brokers are fundamental to the success of automated trading strategies.”

NextPointHost’s Forex servers allow professionals to run an automated trading system or Forex signal 24/7, minimizing latency and slippage. Downtime poses a serious threat to automated trading, leading to missed trade actions and lower profitability.

The company’s software solutions safeguard financial professionals against technical issues. AlwaysUp, for example, comes free with every Forex VPS. The software prevents crashes and notifies users via email or SMS in the rare case that something does go awry. Forex servers also install updates automatically without the need for a reboot.

“Our patented technologies for the optimization of financial trading ensure the stable performance of critical financial servers,” Genko said.

The company’s Forex servers are strategically placed in financial hot spots like London and Frankfurt, providing close proximity to the servers of many brokers. Genko told us this makes connections incredibly fast, vastly improving the trading experience. “If you find your trading results are being adversely affected by poor execution and slippage, a dedicated Forex VPS service may well be the answer to your problems,” he said.

The most significant industry shift Genko said he’s witnessed has been the gradual migration from physical servers to virtual machines, which has been especially beneficial to small businesses.

“Market conditions are constantly changing — these days, almost everything is going to the cloud,” he said. “The physical servers are primarily used in clusters by hosting providers or big enterprises. The cost of maintaining physical servers is typically too high for small businesses’ budgets.”

Genko said virtualized solutions are still reliable, even if they come at a lower price point than dedicated servers. “As a NextPointHost customer, you’ll forget about slow websites or service problems,” he said. “Here, the problems rarely happen.”

The company’s plans run the gamut from shared hosting that costs just 2.92 euros per month to robust cloud infrastructure solutions starting at 21.06 euros per month. Managed WordPress Hosting is also available, providing automatic updates, daily backups, free SSL certificates, free transfers, and a higher level of protection against WordPress-specific threats. Comprehensive WordPress tutorials are the icing on the cake, offering tips on themes, plugins, security, administration, troubleshooting, and performance optimization.

NextPointHost pledges to continue development to stay up-to-date and stand apart from the competition. That’s what NextPointHost has done since its early foray into cloud computing, and it’s even the inspiration behind the company’s name. “We are the next point — one point ahead of the others,” Genko said.

Genko told us NextPointHost crafts all of its products and services with care. “The small details create the quality,” he said.

Acknowledging that the customer knows best, the company takes a user-centric approach to product development. “Customer feedback is the main engine used to improve existing services and introduce new ones,” Genko said. “We discuss every piece of feedback given to us from clients.”

The company assumes that when one client is in need of something, there’s likely another looking for the same solution. NextPointHost’s goal is to provide a service catered to their ever-changing needs. “When you have a happy customer, they’ll be loyal to the brand and recommend you to friends,” Genko said.

Long-term plans include possible expansion into a new datacenter in the New York area — a financial hub that would play nicely with the company’s Forex VPS service. Until then, NextPointHost’s internal departments will work as a series of moving parts to ensure constant improvement. “The software developers work to constantly improve our website and patented technologies, and the marketing team works on new promotions and shares ideas for new services,” Genko said.

Genko said the company’s positive culture helps reduce stress, provide motivation, and improve attitudes. Employees are permitted to work from the company’s offices or from home. One summer, they even had the option to leverage the healing power of the sun.

“We had an outdoor office on the beach,” Genko said. “The sunrays and the scent of the sea energized people.”