How Touchstone Delivers Robust Managed Hosting Services Through VMware Solutions and High-Performance Cloud Infrastructure

TL; DR: Touchstone Solutions built its hosting business by catering to Indian tech experts and professionals who understood the value of quality products and excellent customer service. Now, the company offers a wide range of clients a high-performance cloud hosting solution that guarantees 99.9% uptime and protects websites from malicious attacks. The Touchstone team is also proud of its enterprise virtualization solution, which includes plans for both Linux and Windows. As Touchstone looks to the future, it plans to expand its reach to continue serving businesses both large and small.

When Touchstone Solutions launched its hosting service, its primary customers were established web designers and experienced tech professionals in India who understood the value of the company’s solutions. Those clients also appreciated that Touchstone actually provided the services it promised.

“A lot of our competitors offered many impressive features, but they didn’t deliver on their promises,” said Srikanth Medasani, Touchstone’s Director. “The customers we served really understood the marketplace and knew what they were getting. For a long time, they were our primary market.”

Touchstone still serves those clients, but it has expanded its customer base to include smaller Indian ecommerce operations. Touchstone’s large customers, one of whom has offices in Bangalore, Dubai, and Australia, typically rely on the company’s managed services. But Touchstone is equally as attractive to SMBs, with a hosting service as robust as that of Amazon Web Services (AWS) at one-eighth the price.

The team’s responsive customer support team is another differentiator in the Indian market. Experienced tech experts understand the importance of responsive support, especially during emergencies. And self-starting entrepreneurs may need additional assistance to navigate complex hosting infrastructures and technologies. Touchstone customers rest assured that, if their servers ever go down, the company stands ready to restore them around the clock.

Often, that commitment is what separates great providers that value customers from average hosting services that merely focus on bringing in the largest volume of clients with less regard for product quality. The Touchstone team’s goal is to never let its clients down.

“We don’t oversell our services. When I tell prospective customers that we have a hands-on approach to support, I mean it,” Srikanth said. “Throughout our company’s history, almost all of our clients have come from references. And since the first day we launched, we haven’t lost a single client because of dissatisfaction with our support team or our pricing model.”

One of Touchstone’s most popular products is the high-performance cloud hosting solution. Srikanth said the company is proud of the fact that many clients use it for C-Panel shared cloud hosting.

Its cloud hosting service uses WHM cPanel and CloudLinux, which is why Touchstone guarantees its customers 99.9% uptime. And, because its cloud clusters distribute resources with high-performance Intel Xeon E5 servers, the platform has no single point of failure. The team uses RAID and triple replication technology with more than 1,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) to ensure that its SSD cloud data storage is fully redundant. All of that technology ensures customers can count on fast load times and continuous operations.

Touchstone also provides full cloud backups daily. Everything from MySQL databases to emails are stored for up to seven days. That means, even in the worst-case scenario when a website experiences downtime, it can be restored quickly.

In addition, its anti-DDoS network protects websites from malicious attacks. Exploit detection software stops malware from hijacking accounts, sending spam, or executing any other actions that could get a site blacklisted or deindexed. Even if a site is targeted, Touchstone guarantees bandwidth with a fail-safe network.

Touchstone’s administrative team also goes above and beyond for its cloud clients. Customer support is available 24/7 through both an email and a ticket system, and representatives can guide new customers through cPanel, help install open-source applications like WordPress and Joomla, and even help restore hosting accounts from previous backups.

The Touchstone team is also very proud of its enterprise virtualization solution. And it begins with a focus on the fundamentals.

“After all of our years in the hosting business, we’ve seen that hosts rarely ever go down if their servers are configured properly,” Srikanth said.

That’s why Touchstone uses VMware ESXi, an enterprise-class type-1 hypervisor, to deploy and serve its virtual private servers. The approach helps protect Touchstone customers in a variety of ways. First, it stores data across three servers.

“We can individually move the VMware across each of the servers. It’s like a manual cloud and backups are also important,” Srikanth said. “While we used to use VM Backup, we switched to NAKIVO, which is better because it gives us more flexibility. If one host or server goes down, we move it to the next in five or six minutes.”

While each of Touchstone’s servers is capable of holding up to 128 GB, the company never puts more than 50 GB on them.

“We don’t overload our servers. We stop the processing power at 65% and RAM at 70%. Once that’s reached, we don’t sell anymore on the server,” Srikanth said.

Customers also enjoy that Touchstone’s solutions come with a money-back guarantee. If they’re not satisfied with the service, they can request a full refund within the first 10 days. But with 99.9% uptime and hosting plans for Linux VPS, Windows VPS, and Fully Managed VPS, even the most demanding customers can find a solution tailor-made for their long-term needs.

From its beginnings as a solution for tech-savvy developers and web professionals in India, Touchstone has always believed in adapting to the market and investing in more powerful solutions. Now, it serves a broad customer base with the same dedication and commitment to service.

“We’re reinventing ourselves. We used to only cater to tech experts, but that has changed,” Srikanth said. “Whether our customers run small businesses or are giant internationals, they demand strong infrastructure, top-notch security, and the highest maximum uptime.”

Touchstone expanded its offerings in response to shifts in the market that allowed anyone to become an online entrepreneur. Srikanth said that by focusing only on the most technically knowledgeable users, the company wasn’t fully reaching its potential. Now, the company is marketing itself to those SMB owners who can benefit from its services.

“We’ve started buying more ad space and using SEO. It makes a difference, and we’re only going to do more branding. Over the next six months, we’ll be adding a lot of things to our website, and our customers will find a number of new tools they can download,” Srikanth said.

While it’s not easy to break into new markets, the Touchstone team believes that its product quality will speak for itself. After all, the company wouldn’t be embarking on this new journey if it weren’t for all of the satisfied customers who have relied on it for so long. One of those customers, Rammohan Rao of Tadimety Aromatics, has used its services since 2006.

“Touchstone has always given us fast customer service when we needed it. We didn’t see this with other hosting companies,” Rammohan said.

Because it was built on that foundation of responsive customer service and robust solutions, Touchstone’s expansion is bound to succeed.