Starting a cloud services provider

BusinessWings: Tell us about what Boxed Ice does…

David Mytton: In one of my previous jobs we had a fairly small number of servers, but the existing tools to monitor them, to notice when things were going wrong and troubleshoot them, weren’t suitable for integrating into gateways – so I went about creating a system with that use in mind.

For small businesses and individual users to get the stats on their servers that they need, it requires minimal effort with everything hosted by us. There is nothing they really need to install and we handle everything for them. It’s on fast-model software where you pay monthly to access everything on the server.

We get an idea of exactly how their servers are preforming and if they are going to slow down and why. Slow websites cause visitors to leave, so it costs a lot of money.

When things break on servers, we provide stats to help them troubleshoot the problem.

BW: Boxed Ice is effectively a provider of cloud services isn’t it?

DM: Yes, we host everything for you. You sign up on the website and get going in a couple of minutes. There is no software to install; you just need agent that runs on your server, reporting data back to us.

That only takes a few moments to get going and the service is active entirely through your web browser. It’s also accessible through smartphones as we have an iPhone and Android app.

You don’t have to run anything yourself; you pay a service fee and everything is maintained and managed by the server provider

BW: Tell us more about the smartphone apps…

DM: It means that our customers can view their server stats on their mobile device and problems, which is useful because problems can arise at any time of the day or night. When problems come up we send them an email, which you might not pick up until the morning, so you can get alerts sent directly to your phone. You can solve problems a lot faster, which means there is no downtime, or at least less downtime.

BW: How would you encapsulate the advantages of cloud computing?

DM: You don’t have to run anything yourself; you pay a service fee and everything is maintained and managed by the server provider. It means you don’t have to manage software updates or manage your own servers and other infrastructure.

You can get going a lot faster and because you pay monthly, you are not tied into any contracts, so there is less initial capital outlay. You don’t have to buy a software licence; you just pay for your own usage, so it’s generally cheaper.

BW: With benefits like that, won’t every business store everything on a cloud sooner or later?

DM: It’s very beneficial for smaller companies and individuals because they can sign up and start using them immediately. It’s going to be a slower take-up for larger companies because they tend to have more complex requirements and a longer sales process.

But there are still advantages to them. It means they don’t have to have large licences up front; they can pay as they go. It’s just a case of them how they evaluate things in the long term.

BW: Where’s the business at in terms of its growth?

DM: We closed an investment round about two months ago, because we’re expanding the engineering team to work on things faster. We’re also working on expanding the marketing side of things and hoping to grow the company over the next couple of years.

BW: Speaking of marketing, how do you get word of your product out there?

DM: Because it’s easy for people to get going we tend to target individual developers as they can use it for free on their server. They tend to use it at home on small projects and then take it to work where they can deploy it across a larger number of servers.

We focus on reaching those individuals at user group meet-ups, conferences and those kinds of things. We all have a technical background so we can talk to our target market on their level.

BW: And how much do you use social media?

DM: We interact with customers and answer questions on our blog, our largest traffic source about technical problems or interesting things we’ve been working on. Occasionally we write about an announcement or a feature, but it’s very much focused on general technical information, which is what will encourage people to subscribe and read it on a regular basis. It’s also a good marketing tool for publishing press releases.

BW: What kind of technical problems do you address on the blog?

DM: As we grow, we encounter problems with scaling some of the tools in the backend, growing are infrastructure to handle new customers… Many people will have the same kind of issues further down the line, so we write about how we’ve fixed the problems.