ManageMyServices Overview
ManageMyServices was formed by me in 2005 after several years of development, and in 2007 embarked upon a period of rapid expansion, producing major growth in all four business divisions. It was primarily formed to provide outsourced IT website hosting solutions to a worldwide group of customers who are looking for responsive support, dependable service and complete control of their IT hosting environment. The simple company mission statement of providing "Total Care, Total Quality, Total Control" was designed to encompass these key service aspects. It was sold in September 2009.
Business Strategy
The company was formed as a marketing and service based organisation. ManageMyServices owned no infrastructure of its own, instead outsourcing this to a select group of service suppliers based in the United States. It did not own a datacenter or the server hardware within the datacenter, instead leasing equipment and facility space from carefully selected vendors. This enabled the company to focus on its core competencies, consisting of service provision, marketing and application development activities.
The company aimed to provide the customer with a fully-scalable, fully managed, on-demand IT hosting platform. The customer could start with a small $9.95 yearly shared hosting account from BASICHOST and as their needs changed and their online venture continued to grow they could expand their hosting platform as necessary, potentially ending up with a leased server dedicated solely to them, provided by ManageMyBox. All provisioned services were fully scalable and could be deployed in under 24 hours, which ensured the customer never had to commit unnecessary IT expenditure to their hosting services as the package could be upgraded at the click of a button through the unique Customer Control Center environment.
Company Divisions
ManageMyBox.com (Leased Managed Server Division)
 ManageMyBox provided a customer with a leased dedicated server, hosted in a United States based datacenter facility for a fixed monthly amount. The customer was under no contract and could cancel their service at any time. ManageMyBox had dedicated racks within particular datacenter facilities where server hardware was deployed and then the server applications were setup and configured by ManageMyBox technical staff. The primary aim was to provide the customer with a completely on-demand hosting platform, which could be controlled through ManageMyServices' Customer Control Center and supported by ManageMyServices' technical support team. Unique vendor relationships ensured that when a customer ordered a new dedicated server, it was built, racked, networked, configured and deployed to the customer often in less than 24 hours from order. The servers were fully managed, meaning any problems with software, hardware issues and server outages were handled by ManageMyServices technical support staff available 24/7 via the Customer Control Center. There were several hundred servers deployed and under management by ManageMyBox.
ManageMyHosting.com (High-Level Website Hosting Division)
 ManageMyHosting provided customers with a premium website hosting account on a shared hosting server. This service was aimed at those customers requiring a large amount of website space and bandwidth to run their website but that did not quite have the need for a dedicated hosting service yet. The service also provided hosting accounts which could further be divided up into separate domains, allowing customers to resell their space to others. This service could be managed via both a control panel based on the shared hosting server to control website settings, and the ManageMyServices Customer Control Center to upgrade the website space and bandwidth allocations as the customer expanded and their needs changed. Hosting was provided for a non-contractual monthly fee, starting at $6.95 per month. There were two shared hosting servers in operation by ManageMyServices with several hundred hosting accounts active.
ManageMyName.com (Value-Added Services Division)
 ManageMyName provided additional add-on services to customers, producing link-sales across all divisions, for example, a domain name (.com/.net/.org) or SSL Certificate (Allowing secure transfer of information to a website i.e. https ://). These add-on services were provided as a complimentary service to both existing customers and potential future hosting customers and were provided through a reseller agreement and branded with the ManageMyName image. The price of these services was set low enough to ensure as much of the existing customers' business was conducted through ManageMyServices and they therefore did not need to venture to a competitor to supply the add-on products, potentially finding competing hosting solutions. It was therefore used as a method of customer retention rather than a profit-centre for the company.
BASICHOST.net (Economy Website Hosting Division)
 BASICHOST.net was a division designed to support those who had just produced their first web-page and required somewhere to host it. These pages were likely to be personal pages where the customer did not wish to have a large monthly fee to support what was simply a hobby or experimental project. BASICHOST provided a basic hosting account with a limited amount of web space and bandwidth for a small yearly fee (starting at $9.95). The hosting account could be managed by a control panel on the shared hosting server and could be scaled to a larger package as necessary using the Customer Control Center. Due to the low price of the packages they were designed to be self-supporting with minimal technical support provided by ManageMyServices.
Customer Control Center
Developed entirely in-house and based on several years industry experience, the Customer Control Center was one of the most advanced account management systems available in the industry. It provided functionality for both employees and customers to manage every aspect of customer accounts. This included management of customer account details held, customer billing invoices < statements, technical support provision through an integrated helpdesk system and finally complete management of any packages held by a customer through any company division. Services could be added and removed on-demand by a customer to their Customer Control Center account, ensuring they could scale as necessary without even contacting customer service staff.
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