Dade2 is a company that can help you with Web Hosting, IT Consulting, and IT Support.
In this interview, we are talking to Mr. Manuel Trongone, the company’s CEO. I’m sure we will have a very interesting conversation with him, and he will help us learn new things.
How long have you been on the market until now? What was the main idea behind Dade2?
Dade2 was founded back in 2009. Having the chance to work for several large web hosting and cloud computing companies before launching Dade2, I’ve taken the opportunity to look through a magnifying glass at the business, and shape my idea of a better cloud company, where we know each customer in person, deeply understand the business sense of their environment with us, to be able to serve them better. With a human touch, you don’t get it very often nowadays.
The focus has always been on B2B as we felt that the right mix of know-how and technology applied to the cloud could help our customers build a faster and more secure infrastructure to grow their business.
What challenges have you faced along the way?
When Google and Amazon joined the hosting and clouded industry, they flattened a previously divided and diversified market into a vast and heterogeneous constellation of small and medium providers with their peculiarities and expertise. That’s where we found the inspiration and even more opportunities than before. The big players helped all of us in creating a buzz and transforming what was a niche market into a mass market, dragging even the most conservative businesses into the cloud era. As a result, I can safely say there’s more need than ever among smaller firms to accelerate their journey to the cloud and be closer to their customers through the adoption of the cloud.
What are the most popular products and services of Dade2?
Other than Cloud Server, our core offer, in the last couple of years, we’ve seen a massive demand for two services: Managed Kubernetes and VDIs. There are plenty of companies that want to innovate the way they develop applications, leveraging on the microservices, but they are missing one key point: DevOps expertise.
Here comes Dade2, with a team of DevOps that will guide the client from the first assessment call till the go-live of the project and the related maintenance. We also provide training sessions to empower internal teams to confidently manage the Kubernetes/Dockers systems with confidence and the proper know-how transfer.
No need to say that the other best-seller have been VDIs. Since COVID and the demanding need of working remotely, we’ve seen a growing interest in virtual desktops, both from small and medium and enterprise companies worldwide.
What are the markets that you are covering at the moment? Are you planning to expand to other markets as well?
We’re covering Europe as a whole with 4 cloud regions: Germany, Spain, Iceland and Italy that will be added at the end of this year. Then we’re covering US and LATAM with USA EST (Miami) and Argentina. We plan to maintain a strong presence in these markets, adding more regions in the upcoming 18 months.
Customer satisfaction is very important. So how do you handle that part?
I would say that is the right mix of of 3 elements:
- Our consultive approach that allow us to know each and every customer we have, their goals, interact with their IT team and find the best way to implement the projects in a fast and effective way.
- The high-end performance we provide to every customer. Between 2019 and 2020 we’ve done a huge investment to completely revamp our cloud regions and convert them to all-flash cloud. Nowdays all the storage we have, including the backup systems, are running on HPE Enterprise SSD disks. What is the main advantage for our customers? They pay SSD in Dade2 like standard SATA with the competitors.
- Word-Class support: Once the customers are up and running on our cloud, we provide a full-inclusive support that cover all their needs: Networking, System Administration, DBA etc. 24/7. In this way they are never alone in the Cloud journey and don’t have to wait hours for an answer. We guarantee a 15 minutes response time to every and each ticket.
In your opinion, what are the most essential features of one web hosting provider?
- Uptime
- Quality of Support and response time
- Performance
- Pricing
What new products and services are you particularly interested in now that will be popular in the following period?
In the upcoming months, we’re going to focus more and more on microservices and APIs integration to allow massive cloud deployments and AI services.
Do you expect any significant changes in the web hosting industry in the upcoming period?
I think that in the next 24 months, we’ll see the market getting more and more demanding in terms of cloud/web hosting as nowadays, any kind of business is entirely relying on the internet to offer and sell their products and services. So I think many small providers will be forced to convert into resellers of larger cloud companies to maintain SLAs that will be more demanding every year.
What are your plans for 2023?
We’re going to approach 2023 with a clear roadmap: 4 additional cloud regions, new tools to maintain the “0 downtime” target during the most complex migrations, and a new simplified GUI to manage even the most complex networking setup inside our portal in an easy way.
In the first semester of 2022, we’ve seen a +40% growth in our customers, with two new blue-chip companies joining our portfolio. We foresee a bright and exciting 2023 in Dade2, and we’re working hard to bring to all our existing and future customers a fantastic surprise in Q4 2022 in terms of Public Cloud speed.
What advice would you give to our readers on what to look for when picking their hosting provider?
I would advise everyone to spend some time testing the services; that doesn’t mean doing a simple benchmark of performance, but to try and test the support teams behind the hosting you are going to buy. Try to understand if they are supportive and responsive and if they go the extra mile to keep you on board. As a customer, you’re probably giving your whole business to their ends, so understanding the ethic behind a company is much more important than doing a latency test.