This week, we had the opportunity to speak with Ameen Pishdadi, the founder of
GigeNET – a solution that offers a range of robust and secure web hosting products that will guarantee industry-leading uptime, managed service-level plans, and automated DDoS protection.
What is GigeNET?
GigeNET is a dedicated server and colocation company based out of Chicago, Illinois. We provide a variety of managed and unmanaged server hosting solutions, virtual hosting, and colocation services.
Please describe the story behind the company: What sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?
We started in 1997 as a virtual hosting company under the banner of
globalwebhost.com. Back then there were no control panels and Linux was very new to the scene.
We designed one of the first control panels which allowed customers to do things like manage email addresses and set up forwarders, amongst other things. In 2003 we started gearing our services more towards dedicated server hosting.
As a result of rapid growth, we had to expand our data center footprint – we ended up opening up our own facility just outside of Chicago in 2006. We also launched
ddosprotection.com around this time and were one of the first DDoS mitigation providers around. We pioneered many DDoS protection techniques that are still being used to this day by the general public.
What services do you offer?
We provide colocation services in our own Chicago data center, from a single server to multiple full racks.
We also offer a variety of dedicated server configurations in Chicago, LA, and Ashburn, Virginia. These servers can be configured to order, or we can build out more advanced configs like VMware clusters or hyper-converged Proxmox with Ceph clusters. All new servers include a full terabyte of managed backups at no extra cost using R1soft/Idera. Veeam backups are also available, as are management plans.
In addition, we also offer full-featured cloud hosting with virtual machines available in Chicago, LA, and Ashburn, Virginia.
We heard that GigeNET has something called “DraaS” in the pipeline. Could you share some more information about it?
One of our newest services we plan to start offering is DRaaS, Disaster recovery as a service, all dedicated and cloud servers will have an option for a DR fail-over setup.
It will allow customers to have their systems failover seamlessly from one server or location to another.
The customer will have to do minimal configuration, the setup will be almost automatic and done from our end. Customers can manually failover in case they need to do maintenance or testing.
What separates GigeNET from other similar websites/companies?
Our experience in the industry, we have been around since 1997 – that’s almost 25 years!
We focus on customer service and providing reliable service that does not go down. We give a 100% network SLA and hardware SLA, and we provide 24/7 support by email, ticket, and phone with a 15-minute ticket response SLA.
All of our support staff are based in the USA and we never outsource our support team. We are able to come up with solutions to any sort of problem a customer is facing while being more cost-effective than other managed hosting companies.
We are also SOC 2 Certified, with a yearly security audit which a lot of our enterprise customers require.
Which trends and technologies do you find to be particularly intriguing these days, and how do you envision the future of your industry?
Moving to Kubernetes is a trend that GigeNET has started to take part in, and has begun migrating our own internal services to it. Kubernetes is an advanced orchestration platform, and the concept of micro containing every service is rather new to the industry.
Kubernetes to us provides a higher degree of availability, and the power to launch entire software stacks in seconds provides a large amount of flexibility when trying to deploy a service for clients. I believe you will see most companies start migrating to the platform. In fact, we are already starting to see it as the main method of deployment for a lot of software stacks that are hitting the market.
