At Hostingcon 2011, Lindsey speaks with TVCNet CTO Jim Walker about his participation in the cPanel Community Forums and cPanel from a website owner’s perspective.





TRANSCRIPT


[intro]


Lindsey White: Welcome back to the cPanel Podcast. My name is Lindsey and I’m your host. Today, I will be interviewing Jim Walker, CTO of TVCNet, at Hostingcon 2011 in San Diego, California.


Hi, Jim.


Jim Walker: Hey, Lindsey, how are you doing?


Lindsey: OK. I’d like to start off, basically, could you explain how you use cPanel and what is your relationship with cPanel? I know that you’re a user.


Jim: Yeah. We’ve been in the hosting company business for about 15 years and we’ve been using cPanel for over 5 of those years.


I have to tell you, it’s made a big difference in the quality of service that we provide to our clients, particularly the cost. You have this easytouse control panel. When a client has a question, you’re able to answer it quickly.


I guess you could say, you don’t have to hire as large a staff, because the control panel makes it so much easier for the clients to work on their websites and do things like check through statistics and add their email accounts without our help.


Lindsey: That’s nice.


Jim: Back in the ’90s, we used to have to do that stuff manually.


Lindsey: Have you had a good experience with support at cPanel?


Jim: cPanel support is pretty amazing. I would say that, on average in the past year, their support times have gone down to about less than 10 minutes.


Lindsey: Oh, wow.


Jim: Now, maybe some of the questions we ask aren’t as complicated, but it’s pretty amazing because, occasionally, we’ll send in a question that we just simply can’t figure out and the cPanel guys will pop up, five minutes, boom, done.


Not only that, they usually provide a nice explanation. Over time, their explanations help us improve our business.


Lindsey: Nice. Have you taken advantage of the forums? What are your thoughts on that? Is that a good medium?


Jim: Oh, yeah. All the cPanel guys here know me by name, so I’ve been meeting them because of some of my forum posts about cPanel.


You know, I’m in business. I’m a business and I need quality service for the software that I am paying for. I’m paying for this. As a result, I go to the forums and I ask some pretty pointed questions.


I think, the majority of the time, these guys really go out of their way to answer. If there’s an issue that can’t be resolved today, they’re pretty good about describing, “Well, we’ve got that on our roadmap,” or “We’re going to work on that X number of days out.”


The community is really nice, too, because when I ask a question, a lot of times I’ll get feedback from other hosting companies or professionals.


Lindsey: It’s kind of like knowledge sharing.


Jim: Oh, yeah, yeah. I love it.


Lindsey: How receptive have they been to new feature requests and suggestions, that sort of thing?


Jim: I think, through the forums and their support channels, I think the cPanel guys are on top of stuff. I hate to paint a perfectly rosy picture. cPanel’s not perfect. But normally, when there’s a problem… Like, we’ve had some security problems in the past, a couple of years back. cPanel, once they get alerted of it, they take care of it. They fix stuff.


It almost seems like cPanel has gotten to a point, a level of maturity, where everything works well and now they’re just adding features. Not always are they the greatest features, but they put effort into it.


Lindsey: They’re constantly improving.


Jim: Yeah. They’re constantly improving. Absolutely.


Lindsey: How long have you been using cPanel?


Jim: I mentioned that. Over five years.


Lindsey: Over five years. OK.


Jim: It might even be up in nearly 10 years since cPanel version 1.0 was out.


Lindsey: Oh, wow. You’re a longtime user.


Jim: Well, since ’97 or so, is when we started our hosting business. When cPanel came out, it was like, “Hey, guys, this is really cool. Let’s check it out.”


Lindsey: Yeah. “It makes my life easier.”


Jim: It was reasonably priced at the time and we tried it and, like I said, we’ve been happy with it since.


Lindsey: Either here, at HostingCon, or other places, do you meet people that you have talked to in the forums?


Jim: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.


Lindsey: You meet people all the time?


Jim: All the time. The guy has to kind of point themselves out, but I’ve met a few people that have been in the forums because a lot of the hosting companies are pretty aggressive. I guess you could say that the hosting business is competitive on the outside, but cooperative on the inside.


I talk to people all the time about what their solutions are and 90 percent of the time, they’ll tell me everything about how their business is, difficulties they’re having in ramping up products…


Lindsey: Oh, so they’re pretty open about it.


Jim: What’s interesting is we all have the same issues. It’s amazing. We all have the same issues.


Lindsey: So even though you’re competing, you can still shoot the breeze…


Jim: It’s funny. I laugh. I always use the term, “You’re preaching to the choir,” because… Been there, done that. You went through your BPS buildup, we did the same thing. “We had these issues.” Oh, yeah, we had the same issues.


Lindsey: Cool.


Jim: It’s kind of neat.


Lindsey: That is neat. At cPanel Podcast, our audience is website owners, primarily. What I would like to ask is, what do website owners get out of using cPanel? Not just the hosting companies, but how does it make their lives easier? What do you think has been the impact for end users?


Jim: Well, there are a lot of competing cPanellike options in the world. A number of control panels. Truthfully, I think cPanel has really taken the lead. They are really, I believe, number one in the control panel business.


There are a few others out there, but cPanel has really ramped up their support levels and the quality of their service, up to a point where the other control panel companies, I don’t know if they’ve given up, or whether they just figure, “Business as usual, we’re just going to do what we can do but we’re not going to try to compete with cPanel.”


It’s interesting, because I’ve tried different control panels. I really, as of today, I don’t really think there are any other control panels out there that a person can log into and really be able to do all the things that you can with cPanel.


Lindsey: Would you describe it as an intuitive interface for users?


Jim: Yeah.


Lindsey: Pretty easy to understand for a new website owner?


Jim: Yeah. I think it’s been developed over time. People complain, in the forums and otherwise, and I think cPanel is pretty good about implementing improvements in the interface and just making it slicker and keeping up with HTML, whatever the latest version is. They seem to be pretty good about that.


Lindsey: You think we’ve made some progress between when you first started using it and now?


Jim: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. If you look at the control panels from 2005 and today, they don’t even look the same anymore, obviously. There have been vast improvements.


Interestingly enough, the features haven’t really changed that much. It’s all the good, standard features that an end user would need. Clients have everything they need, all in one place.


Lindsey: Yeah. Why did you decide to attend HostingCon?


Jim: HostingCon’s a great experience because… Other HostingCons are the same way. You get to meet other hosting company operations and kind of get an idea of what the competition’s doing. That is really the advantage of HostingCon.


I think most people, though, would say that networking is really the big focus. Me, personally, I’m all about talking to people. Getting to know what their infrastructure is and where they’re at in the game.


We’re all roughly in an even playing field. There is cloud hosting and BPS hosting. They’re all just different forms of technology, but they all do the same thing. Clients want the same thing. They want customer service. They want reliability, they want good uptime. They want those three things.


It doesn’t matter whether the cloud or whether it’s at Hosting Company X, with a BPS or a shared server. They just want those things.


HostingCon is really good, though. We talk about the future and some of the evolving things that are happening in the industry to kind of give us all a moment to take a breath and get an understanding what we’re all doing because, in a vacuum, most of us hosting companies? We live in a dark room.


We look around, we Google our competitors and see what they’re doing but, truthfully, until we actually get in a setting like this, we really don’t know. We really don’t have a full understanding of what our competitors are doing, where we stand in the industry pricing wise, velocity wise. These are good things to do.


Lindsey: When did your company start web hosting?


Jim: Back in the late ’90s, we started. Around the ’97 period. I worked for a previous hosting company. That’s the way we all usually work.


Lindsey: Oh, yeah. I’ve heard that story.


Jim: Yeah, back in the ’90s, we all worked at the 1.0 version hosting companies which, the customer service was kind of marginal. It was big costs and everything like that.


When I started my business, it was pretty much, “I can do better. I can do better customer service. I can hire people and I can work with them direct and really make this a usable and fun business to be in.”


For the past 15odd years, that’s what I’ve been doing, pretty much 24/7. I think I did take a couple weeks’ vacation for my honeymoon. I think I did do that.


Lindsey: [laughs] Wow. That’s dedication.


I don’t know, are you using Enkompass at all?


Jim: Enkompass is an interesting product, because it’s Windows and we’re not a big Windows shop anymore. We were at one time, and we’ve sort of transitioned away from it for a variety of reasons.


Truthfully, the main reason is most of our techs are most proficient with Linux, but Enkompass does have some value and because of the quality of cPanel support, my tech guys keep talking about it. They keep bringing it up, “When are we going to bring up an Enkompass server or two?” “When are we going to try this out?”


I guess it’s a matter of, it will happen. We’re looking forward to trying Enkompass because what I know from cPanel is that, if we get into trouble or if we have any issues, I know cPanel is going to back that up.


Lindsey: Oh, yeah. It’s the same support, so you’re in good hands.


Finally, I wanted to ask, are you going to be able to make it to the cPanel conference in October?


Jim: That’s in Texas? Where is that?


Lindsey: It’s going to be in Austin.


Jim: Oh, it’s in Austin, Texas. I did make it last year, so we’ll see. Like I said, HostingCon was important for me, for obvious reasons. You guys just run your business too well. I feel like if I go to a cPanel conference, I’m just going to hear the same old thing. You know?


I’m just comfortable enough with cPanel I don’t feel the need to go there and whack some heads and get things done.


Lindsey: Yeah. That’s cool.


Well, Jim, thank you for speaking with us today. I appreciate it. We hope you enjoy the rest of your time at HostingCon 2011.


Jim: Thank you.


Lindsey: Listeners, tune in next time for more helpful information direct from cPanel.


[outro]


[end of podcast]




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