Last week I had the pleasure of sitting down with Trey Gardner, CEO of GreenGeeks and TigerSites. Here's what Trey had to say:
Chris Lloyd from ResellerGuide.com: What's your title and how does that translate into the day-to-day operations for GreenGeeks and Tigersites?
Trey: I am the CEO of both Green Geeks and Tigersites. As far as the day to day operations for both brands I am involved in all of the areas. I work with the sales and marketing team to make sure that we are getting good exposure in the marketplace as well as make sure that new clients are approved and receive all of their account login information. In addition I work with the technical support and server administration departments to make sure that client's issues are handled by our technicians in an expeditious manner and that are servers are operating at their optimal levels.
Chris: Can you tell us what kind of plans you offer?
Trey: We offer 1 all encompassing web hosting plan for the general public and we offer 5 reseller web hosting plans for web site designers and developers. The General Public plan offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth as well as the ability to host an unlimited amount of domains and emails. It comes with cPanel, the world's #1 web hosting control panel as well as the free Fantastico script library which has web site favorite scripts like Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla and many others. Also included with the plan is a free domain name and 2 free web site template builders which are great for novices. The plan costs are $95.40 for a 1 year term and $166.80 for a 2 year term. Tigersites offers the same package as Green Geeks.
Our reseller program was recently launch and is great for web developers and designers who help manage the web sites of their clients. There are 5 packages to choose from and rates vary between $.95/domain per month all the way down to $.39/domain per month. The servers are 300% green just like the servers at Green Geeks and carry all of the features carried for Green Geeks customers.
Chris: Tell us about what green web hosting really means.
Trey: Green energy web site hosting is web hosting without establishing a carbon footprint or by offsetting your carbon footprint. The reason why this is such a big deal for our industry is because it is estimated that by the year 2020 our web hosting industry will be as large of a environmental polluter as the airline industry. Web servers use huge amounts of electricity, they run all the time and they run hot so they also need huge cooling fans to keep them cold to run efficiently. These huge fans also use large amount of electricity.
There are many ways to offset your carbon foot print in web hosting including using wind energy credits to offset the energy you pull from the grid, use solar power to lower the amount of energy you need to pull from the grid during daylight hours as well as configuring the servers so that they run more efficiently using less energy, running cooler and needing less of the fans cooling power. At Green Geeks, TigerSites and our reseller company we are actually carbon negative which means we not only lower our carbon footprint but we actually put more carbon reducing power into the grid by purchasing 3 times the wind energy credits needed to offset our use. In addition we modify our servers so that they run cooler using less energy than other companies servers.
Chris: Are there web hosts out there claiming to be green but not walking the walk? No need to name names.
Trey: I would rather be an optimist when it comes to the trends in web hosting pushing more towards going green. We have had many web hosting companies contact us and ask us how we do what we do to be more eco friendly and we are actually fine with helping our competition become greener. I have heard from customers and environmental advocates that they have run across numerous companies out there who claim to be eco friendly but who don't look to employ and real eco friendly initiatives, they are green in name alone. I don't waste my time checking up on these so called green companies to see what they do, my focus is to forge ahead with my own initiatives and let the marketplace follow. Consumers are savvy and eventually they will root out these companies standards and force them to go green in more than just name or risk losing that business to us and the other true green web hosts.
Chris: What types of advertising methods are you using to promote your brands?
Trey: We employ mainly online marketing for building our sales and to promote our brands. Our best consumers are people who are web savvy and are looking for web hosting or who are looking to change from some hosting company which are not servicing their needs. We market in web sites, blogs and news web sites.
Chris: Where are you datacenters located?
Trey: Our data center is located in Chicago with offices there as well as Toronto and Los Angeles. We are looking at opening more locations over the next year as well.
Chris: Are you planning on a controlled growth or is it pedal to the metal?
Trey: I would love to say pedal to the metal but I have been with other web hosting companies before this one and some have had that "at all costs" mentality. They would try to grow as fast as they could and what I saw with this type of focus were tons of problems. They would short change their employees and purchase sub standard equipment to make room for more marketing dollars to drive more sales. Turnover was high and problems with the servers where your customers web sites reside were a daily occurrence.
At Green Geeks we higher good, smart people and we treat them well, we don't like turnover, in addition we buy only top of the line high quality web servers to make sure our clients accounts run fast and have great uptime. Our customer service department proportionally gets far more calls from customers who are novices and who need instructions on how to do something than we do about any sort of server issue. So far we have been able to grow at a steady pace but with increased sales volumes month over month. We like to push the marketing of Green Geeks not only to acquire customers and grow but to also influence the marketplace into being more eco friendly. We will always look towards growth as building the business and building the awareness.
Chris: Are you going to be at HostingCon in August?
Trey: I may go to Hosting Con in August, I have been before and it is a great place to learn more about the industry trends and to work on partnerships. I also enjoy my daily work activity here at Green Geeks as well and there is a lot to do. Depending upon the participants at the event I may go or may send one of our system administrators, we'll have to see.
Chris: I'll use this question as a vehicle for you to freestyle. Let our readers know everything they need to know about GreenGeeks and Tigersites.
Trey: Sounds good. Here is my personal guarantee to anyone out there who is thinking of signing up with either Green Geeks, TigerSites or our reseller program. I guarantee that if you ever have an issue with our company or any of our employees I am going to get involved. I have been the quality assurance director at other web hosting companies and made sure that if there was anything wrong that our techs could not fix or something wrong with one of our employees that they could get to me and I got things resolved. We don't have a quality assurance director at Green Geeks, Tigersites or our reseller company because we don't need one, I am the guy and the buck stops with me. If you ever have a serious problem with our company ask for me by name.
In addition I want to plead with any web hosting company or any customer of a web hosting company out there to go green. The thought that the servers who run you the customers web sites and which run our web hosting businesses might turn into as big of an environmental catastrophe should be abhorrent to everyone out there. To quote Ben Franklin, "We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately."
Peace, good luck with your web site projects and go green!
Trey Gardner
Thanks for taking the time to chat with us. We like what you guys are doing and wish you the best of luck with GreenGeeks and TigerSites.
Related Sections:
Interviews With Hosting Industry Figures
Related Links:
GreenGeeks Reviews
TigerSites Reviews
Source:
http://www.resellerguide.com/articles/interview-hosting/interview-ceo-greengeeks-tigersites/253
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