“Leading with Faith & Tenacity”

Ken Cox, President, Hostirian, is a pioneer owing to his love for technology that keeps the company pushing forward and looking for what’s next on the horizon. His tenacity to get through the hard parts for sure is a key asset. “There were days after the .com bust, the housing market crash, and when the major coal companies filed for bankruptcy protection where, we were not sure we were going to make it,” he says. “There have been at least three different significant events that happened to the company in the past 20 years, where we were unsure, we would make it, faith and tenacity is the only reason we are here today.” Faith in Ken's team kept pushing them forward, ensuring that Hostirian is here today and will continue to be here for the clients.

One of the core values of Hostirian is if they can automate it, they do. They lean heavily on automation and writing scripts to reduce human intervention as much as possible when it makes sense. As hosting and cloud have become more commoditized, their core differentiator is their staff. “We have created a fantastic SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) system that not only allows for quick implementation of our standards but also, with the way that we have implemented it, allows the frontline team to communicate in a digital manner to the rest of the company,” says Ken. “If an SOP fails, our frontline team has the ability to document a short-term workaround or update the SOP in real time so the next person on the team working this same issue now has the proper tools to resolve an issue.”

Hostirian has digitized all their procedures to help ensure they open a feedback loop and close the feedback loop for the people on the front line. They use digital strategies for all marketing to both their clients and potential clients. Hostirian introduced a podcast in 2021, Clicks and Brick, a fantastic marketing tool to differentiate themselves from the competition and create as much value as they can around their services. “We understand that not every IT load is created equal and that different IT loads require different types of infrastructure. Because of this when we deployed our cloud offering, we created multiple different types of clouds under one hood,” explains Ken. “Our most common cloud we sell is a mixed-use cloud. A mixed-use cloud would have a few virtual desktops and maybe a SQL server and webserver.”

"Keep moving forward with Faith in yourself and your team!"

Hostirian has a different infrastructure specifically designed for something like high graphical or computational use. Each of those would be separate infrastructures, and they tie them all together to provide the type of infrastructure that would best suit the clients' needs. Using this strategy helps Hostirian stay on the bleeding edge of technology. This model also lets them keep their costs down since they don’t have to build for every type of cloud; Hostirian can customize it to the client. On top of that, if one of their standardized products won’t work for the client’s needs, the company will build customized solutions.

“At this point, everything we do is N+1 or need plus 1, so there is always a second set of infrastructure ready to be deployed in the case of a failure. That way, if something does happen to a physical server, the load will move to a different physical server that is not affected. On top of that, we have not only partnered with Veeam but also Acronis for disaster recovery in case something were to happen to the datacenter. We could recover with the Veeam or Acronis backup if the customer chooses to get that insurance. We highly recommend DR solutions, but not every customer chooses to use it,” says Ken. “Every workload is different, not all data needs to be backed up at the same rates. We work with our clients to figure out what they need to keep their workloads protected and understand what data is backed up.” IE