Lessons from a decade in infrastructure hosting

I’ve recently celebrated 10 years working in the hosting industry.?

In that time, I’ve accumulated a bunch of experience across the industry buying and selling infrastructure. Experience that I thought might be worth sharing with others in the industry or those who are looking at a potential career in hosting.?

I’ve decided to write them out as ‘lessons’ to reflect some of my favorite lyrics from Atmosphere’s The Woman with the Tattooed Hands:?

“I’ve got a lot to teach but even more to learn”

I don’t claim to have all the answers and these ‘lessons’ reflect the bias and viewpoint that is unique to my experience. But I hope that as a hosting customer or buyer in 2023, they might encourage a useful discussion, offer up an alternative viewpoint or perhaps even give you a taste of what it’s like to work in the industry.?

But before I kick off the lessons, I thought you might be interested to know a bit about me and where my experience comes from. Basically, why should you pay attention to what I have to say??

From account management, to new business and redefining hybrid

I started my career as an account manager for PEER 1 Hosting in Southampton, selling a mixture of cloud, managed hosting and co-location to customers around the world. I moved internally to focus on new business and then on to developing the company’s video game hosting strategy after the business decided to verticalize. As the biggest gamer out of a new business team that didn’t really game, it was an exciting opportunity, if not exactly in my wheelhouse.?

As is often the case, however, moving outside of my comfort zone opened up new opportunities for me that I hadn’t previously considered. I built a strong relationship with one of my key customers, dedicated game server provider Multiplay, and after turning down the offer of a job once, eventually accepted a position at the company.??

At Multiplay, I redesigned the sales and cost strategies of the business and rebuilt the procurement of hosting from the ground up. I ended up managing the procurement relationship with around 20 bare-metal suppliers and all three of the big hyperscale providers. I also helped introduce a new hybrid automated game server concept, specifically developed for Respawn/Electronic Arts and the launch of Titanfall 2.?

At the time, adopting a hybrid approach meant the game developers or publishers striking up a relationship with one of the hyperscale cloud providers and also a bare metal hosting provider. And then building the engine and plugging it in themselves. That’s a lot of work for companies whose strength isn’t in managing infrastructure but in creating and publishing games.?

So, we developed a proposition where we would take the game and plug it into our platform, and we would do all of the hard work sourcing the infrastructure from the hyperscalers and bare metal providers. It meant that Respawn would only have to deal with a single vendor with a multi-vendor approach sitting underneath. One vendor, one set of legals, one set of SLAs and cheaper than going direct to one of the hyperscalers.?

It was here that I experienced the difference between being a highly valuable hyperscale cloud customer compared to a small, less valuable customer and the chasm between the level of support received.?

After growing Multiplay and its subsequent sale to Unity, I spent a year at INAP managing the EMEA and APAC business before moving to Servers.com where I’ve been chief revenue officer for the last four years.?

Upcoming lessons

As the saying goes, every day is a school day and I’ve learnt a hell of a lot in each of these roles. I’ll be sharing my learnings in a series of articles over the next week or so.

These lessons are based on my personal experience in the industry, in certain roles and therefore come with a degree of bias towards a particular perspective.

So, as much as I would like to use these blogs as an opportunity to help others, I also want to learn from your experience.?To have my opinions challenged and alternative perspectives added to the conversation.

Have a read and let me know your views. If you think I’m wrong or there’s a different side to the argument, let’s have a chat.

Keep an eye out for the first lesson - Why you'll pay for cheap infrastructure in the end - coming tomorrow.