Late to the party, but just wanted to thank those of you for the kind words. We really appreciate it.

If interested in learning more about what Vacares can do for not only your web hosting but also your business, feel free to shoot us an email at [email protected] . If we are unable to serve your needs, we are more than happy to point you in the direction of someone that can.

Good luck on your journey, be prepared for lots of ups and downs, but in the end it will be worth it. :-)

I always wondered, is Vacares a solo shop ran by you or are you just an employee?

Also do you have data centers or whitelabel?

I own, have a team with incredible knowledge and experience, and own all of my equipment. :-)

We aren't the biggest, but we do our best to make our clients feel like they are.

Shoot me a message if you want to chat.

Hi there,

We have no limit on the number of domains on VPS and dedicated servers.

Brad

Happy to have you question me on this. By contrast to how we are being portrayed here, we aren’t a sales and marketing heavy organization, not at all. The web site is due for tons of updates and hopefully will get them before year end. I’d have to check the WayBackMachine, but it’s been years since we have made substantive or chunky updates to it.

I have just over 50 full-time employees, two of them are in finance, one is in sales. My time is spent between operations, finance and sales. Everyone else, the entire rest of my team, works squarely in technical operations and product delivery. So, the short answer is we don’t have a sales-centric organization or a cushy back office. We are busy working hard on the deliverable, which is our hosting, cloud and datacenter services.

Most sales come by way of referral from established customers or by the reputation we have established with those clients. Some new business is a result of seeking out new conversations at industry conferences. We do have an affiliate program the last 4 or so years, but it’s tremendously unsuccessful. It turns out our clients just want to send us business and not get paid for it.

We have never done AdWords or purchased traffic beyond doing a miserable job testing a total of a few thousand dollars over the last decade.

For almost all of the 2010’s our entire sales, marketing, travel, meals and entertainment budget expense only accounted for around 3% of our budget. Since Covid, it’s not even a half percent. Hence, my sensitivity to the assertion that we have in any way been disingenuous or paid for what amounts to tremendous goodwill that we receive in this industry. Remember, our active client count is high and then of course there’s the thousands of people we have served whose businesses haven’t survived over the 24 years I’m still here.

So as for your question about k8, the clients we have came from really qualified conversations and leads years ago, never as a result of the web site or online marketing efforts. That’s an area we can improve on. Adding this and other things to our web site is simply a result of where things are in our ecosystem and whether or not I have decided to productize and market them publicly. It’s taken more than 2 decades to create stellar a reputation and it wouldn’t take long to unravel one if not for patience and wisdom in “slow rolling” marketing and other related efforts.

No, of course we don’t have 1,000 employees. I also don’t have 100,000 servers. I do have around 3,000 and that isn’t half bad. Yes, I have cabinets in some data centers.. but I don’t just have cabinets in data centers. I spend more than a million between three different data centers for rent. One of them, the one in California, is another excellent example of something not marketed on our web site. The fourth data center..

Oh, and yes, I have designed, built and actually own a new data center in Michigan. I did this during Covid. It’s not marketed on the web site, not yet. Coincidence, no. Myself and the team have been very hard at work and there’s only so many hours in a day. Technical function is of paramount importance, not sales and marketing. The judge of our business that I measure success on is our own customer satisfaction. It’s hard to make them happy, impossible to make people who aren’t our clients happy, and on a typical day very difficult to make myself happy because I’m a perfectionist.

I don’t imagine that I’ve had more than a handful of posts this length on GFY in the last half decade. So for that, I’m sorry. The roots of this business were built on my posts here and as the tides turn, I imagine there are a lot of posters these days who have never interacted with me. Little known fact, I was banned from GFY, gosh maybe more than 15 years ago, and under false pretenses, to boot. The original owner had a hosting business. I was scrappy adding one client at a time and even his team of sales guys.. and to me, what seemed like all the money in the world, couldn’t compete against my hard work, honesty and giving a better value.

I’m tired. Have a good night everyone!

Brad

Wait till you get into one, then you'll see. It's a known fact, most can sell well, who's the better choice comes when there are issues.

I'm gonna be honest with you, Brad.

I read the first paragraph and then scanned the rest and decided I wasn't gonna read that whole thing, so I guess congratulations or my condolences. Whatever fits the scenario.

i didn't get that far. i figured it was a sales pitch as usual :1orglaugh

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Vacares. Been with the same guys for 20(?) years. No issues ever.
Mike is the best, Ryan, too.

I use both AWS and Digital Ocean. I don't really do anything in there, though, my programmer handles that stuff. I just go where he tells me is best.