Izoox is a Colorado based web development and hosting company. They were founded in 2002 and specialize in highly customized website development and hosting. Matthew Scalf, co-owner and co-founder of Izoox, said their goal is to "shield our customers from the painful and agonizing process of dealing with the Internet in all capacities including web development, SEO, design, hosting, SSLs and domain maintenance."
Izoox's extensive portfolio of services includes web development, web and interface design, managed and unmanaged web hosting, SSL certificates, domain registration, VoIP, and web consultation and management. Izoox always delivered web hosting via third party infrastructure. Currently, Izoox develops and hosts over 500 domains.
Izoox began offering web hosting services in the second year of operations. Scalf describes the company's vision: "when we decided to offer web hosting, we weren't interested in hosting the infrastructure but in providing value-added management services. Additionally, a guiding principal at Izoox is not to take on debt as part of launching new solutions, so our growth needed to be self-funded. This made finding the right solution particularly challenging."
Izoox's first approach was to purchase web hosting hardware and put it in a managed data center. "Our data center partner promised a lot but could not deliver," said Scalf. "One outage lasted 17 hours. We never received an explanation or even an apology." After the outage, the Izoox team authored a rigorous requirements document and extensively researched their options before selecting GoGrid as their infrastructure partner.
Prior to selecting GoGrid, Izoox researched and tested approximately 60 partners over the course of five years. "Every one of these trials went up in flames, including some that involved testing with actual customer websites on third party hosted infrastructure. Some providers laughed at us because we were a small company with huge aspirations. They were only interested in customers who wanted to buy full cabinets."
Izoox almost gave up on offering their customers a hosting solution because of the headache and it became impossible to provide customers with excellent service. Once Izoox discovered GoGrid and after a short period of testing, they were convinced that GoGrid was the right partner to help achieve their aspirations. "The research and benchmarking made it clear that GoGrid was the best choice for us. They embraced our dreams."
GoGrid's ability to deliver on the following critical requirements were key factors with Izoox's decision to select GoGrid as their cloud infrastructure provider:
- GoGrid offers excellent SLAs and meets all of its promises in terms of service and support - GoGrid provides 5X better network and I/O performance than other solutions Izoox evaluated - GoGrid operates multiple datacenters which is important for disaster recovery and continuity planning - GoGrid's locally attached storage was advantageous for performance - GoGrid's partnership model made good business sense
The business relationship with Izoox has multiple dimensions. Izoox started migrating all of their hosted client websites onto GoGrid in 2010 which resulted in solid growth for both Izoox and GoGrid. In addition, Izoox has customers that they do not provide hosting to and in these cases Izoox refers them to GoGrid directly. Scalf said, "We work with a lot of websites that prefer to manage their own hosting. We refer them directly to GoGrid because we know they will receive great service. Through the referral partnership program, we're able to provide our customers a $100 credit to trial GoGrid's service without any commitment. This is a huge benefit for both us and our customers."
Izoox can better help their customers deliver excellent online experiences and operate successful online businesses through their partnership with GoGrid. This has translated into demonstrable success for Izoox. Scalf gives a lot of credit for his recent business successes to the strong partnership that has been established with GoGrid. This includes the personal service he has received as a GoGrid partner/reseller, GoGrid technical support, referral program, etc. He knows that this is a "true partnership where we grow our businesses together."
Accelerated revenue growth
Leveraging the GoGrid solution has created new revenue opportunities for Izoox in terms of time to market with new services and supporting rapid growth. "We are launching multiple new services on top of GoGrid infrastructure and using the GoGrid API. Our hosting business is doubling every month. That is easy to do with a company like GoGrid when you have such a level of trust and reliability."
Improved close rates
By associating their business with the GoGrid brand, Izoox is able to close more deals. "We have definitely seen increased sales. This month alone we have closed four new deals in which the GoGrid partnership was a major selling point. Leveraging the GoGrid brand is a real strength. Additionally, helping our customers avoid infrastructure purchase startup costs also helps us win more business."
Enhanced customer satisfaction
Izoox has heard from customers that website performance has improved because of GoGrid. "Once we started migrating customers to GoGrid, we received a lot of customer testimonials which we never did before. They were attributed to performance and reliability. Customers were calling us out of the blue saying that performance had improved a lot."
Lower total cost of ownership
The Izoox business plan calls for accumulating zero debt. With GoGrid, they were able to build a world-class infrastructure solution without a large upfront investment and turn that into a profit center. "Using GoGrid keeps us financially sound. They met every one of our criteria for what we wanted out of our premier partnership while cutting our ongoing costs in half. The GoGrid partnership program provides us with excellent revenue opportunities, making us both very competitive and profitable. "
