How ServerPronto Delivers More Valuable Dedicated & Cloud Hosting Through Datacenter Ownership & Tech Experience

TL; DR: During the early days of hosting, ServerPronto zigged while everyone else zagged. While other hosts were locking customers into long, expensive contracts, ServerPronto was re-engineering the way business was done and offering no-contract plans that were priced far lower than their competitors. By owning their datacenter, doing their own IT, and being the first to license cutting-edge instant IP migration technology, ServerPronto has found a unique way to offer incredible value.

Before Pedro Sostre joined the ServerPronto team, he was exactly the prospective customer that the dedicated hosting specialists wanted to reach.

While working at another company, Pedro went on a quest to find the right dedicated hosting provider. He contacted numerous companies, gathered all the server specs, and read through all the contracts. He found a deal for a very basic server that cost roughly $600 per month and included a 2-year contract and support.

Meanwhile, the team at ServerPronto was taking a fresh look at how business was done in the hosting industry. If you own the building and are already paying for Internet and electricity, how much does it really cost to buy a server and get it online?

For ServerPronto, the answer at the time was as low as $20 per month for a basic dedicated server — and the company would still make money. Now, you can have their standard dedicated quad-core Intel Xeon server with 8GB of RAM for a remarkably low $59.95 a month.

With those conversations some 16 years ago, ServerPronto illustrated the vast difference between value and cheap hosting. Instead of offering baseline servers with outdated processors at low prices, ServerPronto saves customers money by putting high-quality hardware in their own datacenter and managing them with in-house, Tier II and Tier III technicians.

By keeping their costs extremely low, ServerPronto redefines the price of quality dedicated hosting. Add in an on-site support team, a track record of giving back to communities both domestic and abroad, as well as a refusal to trap customers in long-term contracts, and ServerPronto proves that dedicated hosting can be done right and still be affordable.

Now VP of Marketing for ServerPronto, Pedro told us about how the company originally started as an ISP in South Florida, working with the Miami-Dade Police Department and courthouse system. With a team of long-time Windows-certified technicians, Infolink, ServerPronto’s parent company, had plenty of IT experience to keep their customers online.

Nearby, telecommunications company Global Crossings decided they didn’t want their datacenter anymore. ServerPronto jumped at the opportunity to purchase the 10,000-square-foot facility and began offering hosting and colocation services for $20 per month in 2000.

“It kind of blew up the industry for us because we got several thousand clients very quickly,” Pedro said. “It was either us or the next tier up, which was $400 to $500 a month.”

Now, dedicated hosting plans start with an AMD Athlon Regor server in the “Value” plan at $39.95 monthly and range all the way up to the “Quad-Dodeca Monster” featuring a 4x Intel Xeon server with 96 cores for $1,699.95.

“We try to use enterprise-class or at least server-class hardware in all of our packages,” he said.

Hosting quickly outpaced the colocation, IT, and ISP business and became the core business.

The main reason ServerPronto can keep their dedicated hosting plans so much lower than competitors, according to Pedro, is by keeping their own costs as low as possible.

ServerPronto cuts out the middleman by owning their datacenter instead of leasing space from another company. By having Tier II or Tier III employees at the datacenter 24/7, they can respond to tickets and manage the servers without outsourcing any IT needs.

“They’re working here in the building, so it’s not like you’re dealing with a remote connection or an outsourced team,” Pedro said. “They can walk right over to the server and do something if they need to.”

That results in nearly 100% uptime, and a datacenter that hasn’t had an outage in four years — “knock on wood,” Pedro said.

Always looking for the next hurdle to overcome, ServerPronto recently became the first to license IP mobility technology that would prevent companies, such as Delta Air Lines or Netflix, from experiencing devastating downtime.

“These guys are paying top dollar for hosting,” Pedro said. “The issue is really that, no matter how much you’re paying, you’re still hosted in one physical datacenter.”

In the case of Delta, a fire in their datacenter triggered a switch to the backups stored at other locations. The subsequent delay of switching and propagating IP addresses resulted in hours of crippling downtime and thousands of canceled flights.

ServerPronto’s Geo Redundant Cloud Hosting enables instantaneous IP migration between datacenters in different cities.

In the event your primary datacenter goes down, all of your services would failover to a different datacenter located somewhere else — even if the servers are maintained by a different provider, according to Pedro.

“It’s all about this concept that you don’t need to worry about disaster recovery anymore because you can avoid disaster entirely,” he said. “If one of your datacenters burns to the ground, your audience or customer base won’t even notice. Within milliseconds, you’re already going to be live in a completely different geographic location. Nobody besides your tech team knows that something happened.”

Just as ServerPronto has made dedicated hosting life better for customers like Pedro, they also look for ways to help internally and abroad.

Pedro recently spoke with a customer who had been on the same value server for nine years.

“We gave him a free upgrade to whatever the newest hardware was because he has been with us for so long,” Pedro said. “I couldn’t believe he was still using that old server.”

The company also donates aging hardware to various organizations that install them in schools in developing countries. The machinery is perfectly functional but maybe not to the modern standards to which ServerPronto tries to adhere, Pedro said.

“It’s exciting for us,” he said. “It’s hardware that maybe we could have resold in a secondary market. Instead, we sent hundreds of servers to Haiti, and there are kids in schools that were able to get access to a computer for the first time.”