Here’s why.
When I co-founded CLDY, it was to solve 4 major problems that customers were facing: slow website performance, poor security, constant downtime, and unhelpful customer support.
CLDY had to solve these challenges, but it wasn’t easy starting a company from scratch to do this. Especially since the web hosting industry was a highly competitive one with many large businesses dominating the market.
We weren’t venture-backed, so there wasn’t big VC money behind the decisions we made. We had to be lean and resourceful, and we had to really focus on directing resources towards what mattered.
These were the 4 main areas that we looked at, in order to develop the difference that CLDY brought to the table.
1. Customer satisfaction
This is key for any business to thrive. Your customers are the only reason why your business exists.
To improve customer satisfaction, we implemented tight feedback loops with our customers. Their feedback affected everything that we did, such as the content and usability of our website, our billing and pricing, product features, and our tech.
On top of that, we also proactively went against several common industry norms. We implemented transparent pricing, significantly increased the price-to-value of our products, while at the same, introduced lower prices for entry-level products.
2. Product development
Of all the business functions, we invested the most time and attention on our products because that’s what our customers are buying.
The guiding philosophy that we had was to be pro-active. Being pro-active meant that we had to foresee and predict what the customer needed, instead of simply reacting to what happened after the fact.
Besides developing close customer relations and understanding their needs better, we also relied heavily on tools and equipment in order to achieve this.
We instituted active monitoring of customers’ services so that we could be alerted of any downtime (typically even before the customer is aware). With any incident, we also used it to improve any failure points of our infrastructure, and so got better and better.
We invested in premium hardware with top of the line specifications. This performance allowed us to provide better performance for our customers.
Besides that, we tuned and optimised all services and servers on a regular cadence. This allowed us to prevent common hacks and exploits, thereby increasing resilience drastically over stock images and configurations.
All these translated to a much better experience, not just for our customers but also for our team.
3. Cost-optimisation
Like most businesses, one of our biggest costs is manpower.
Typically, businesses would grow, and their manpower costs would grow in tandem. We wanted to break that, and so invested heavily in automation.
The automation of everyday processes like the escalation of customer support cases, and self-healing of common system faults, allowed us to keep a tight rein on manpower costs.
Besides manpower costs, another big cost comes from infrastructure.
In order to maintain costs and keep costs predictable, we pay our infrastructure suppliers 1-3 years up-front in order to lock-in prices and FX rates.
4. Internal security and access-control policies
One of the biggest security vectors of any organisation is through humans.
The CLDY team works fully remotely, so access control and security is even more important.
As such, we implemented enhanced access control policies to maintain data security. All access requests are only on a as-needed basis, with multi-factor authentication, with both system and supervision approvals.
The result for 2023?
- More than 111 5-star Google reviews
- Double-digit percentage growth in customers
- Our security and vulnerability assessments audited by a CREST-certified vendor
- Met our goal of a baseline 99.9% uptime collectively for our hosting services across 5 public clouds
- Zero churn rate in manpower
A Big Thank You!
We have to thank our customers to recognise our dedication and referring us so willingly, and to our team for believing in our mission to provide the very best in web and email hosting services.
Final words
That’s why businesses should not be focused on chasing revenue. What they should be focused on is a clear mission, and a strict roadmap to achieving that so that their customers can get the value that they need.
Have a great 2024 ahead!
Signing off
Alvin Poh
CLDY Co-Founder & Chairman
