Please tell us a little about yourself.
Im
32, a father of 3, and when I’m not shackled to a desk I enjoy spending
time with the family, fishing, and playing guitar. Anyone that knows me
will tell you I’m very big on core values in every person we hire, and
every project we take on. Core values such as honesty, integrity, and
respect are often set aside in the modern world and particularly behind
the veil of anonymity of the internet. I believe this is precisely the
area where people should adhere to those values the most. If you do, a
reference is as easy as saying “google me”.
Can you summarize your educational experience for us?
I
graduated high school in 94 and joined the Airforce in 95 where I spent
7yrs learning and growing as a person. I took some college while in the
USAF but eventually the demand and excitement of JaguarPC led me to exit the USAF and go at hosting full time.
What do you consider as your accomplishments up to this point?
That
I’ve managed to keep a healthy marriage, raise 3 kids, and all while
running a very demanding business for 10yrs. Hitting milestones such as
100, 500, 1000 servers has been exciting as well.
Any failures you’d like to tell us about?
Nobody
grows as a company or person without some failure. More importantly
though is the lessons you take away from the experience. One big
failing in the past was letting my excitement get the better of us by
not planning properly for our growth. There is no growth worth hurting
a reputation built up by a decade of hard work. Now we work our hardest
on preserving that ideal.
What is your primary occupation?
Whatever my staff, clients, and partners need from me. I wear the CEO
title but the truth is that even with 75 people working for me I still
enjoy getting involved in the daily activities where it all got
started. Our company is all about reflecting that person touch.
How do you manage your time? Will you describe what you do on a daily and/or weekly basis?
Between
my wife and my iPhone I’m able to stay on top of things pretty well
most of the time. My week involves a lot of email between my staff,
management meetings, networking with other professionals, going over
reports from the various areas of our companies, and of course some
daily interactions with clients on forums, instant messengers, and the
phone.
Do you oversell?
We don’t, except for our shared hosting plans. None of our reseller, VPS,
or hybrid plans have any features that are oversold. The shared
technology we use and our vast experience lets us manage the shared
environments so well that we simply never run into the tiny things some
watch all the time like disk space. Simply put, we just can’t run out
of disk space. Even as we speak all our clients could increase their
usage immediately by 500% and it wouldn’t cause alarm. Like cell phone
minutes and bandwidth, the prices of storage are so minute these days
its hard to justify placing a limit and letting a 2tb system only
collect dust while 80% of the space sits wasted. Overselling as a means
of marketing actually is the best way we can tell clients “use more, if
you don’t nobody will” . And our system is setup so you have to have
80% of an initial quota actually used before you request more, but you
can request more as many times as you want and its automatically added.
Tell us about your control panel, is it based on cPanel and what makes it special?
In our shared environment we use cPanel exclusively, but for VPS,
hybrid, and dedicated servers we offer and support a wide range of
control panels and software. We have developed a proprietary platform
that ties into our servers, billing, software, ips, staff, and pretty
much our entire operation. I wouldn’t want to imagine running a company
this size and complex without it.
As part of your managed services you propose monitoring, does that include proactive responses?
Yes.
And we have some really exciting improvements coming to our operation
in the next 30days that will improve that response greatly by adding
new methods of alerts and new tools for clients and our staff to
respond to those alerts.
You propose VPS solutions on JaguarPC and yet you operate wowvps.com too, why?
Wowvps.com
was started off for two reasons; we didn’t want to mix our managed
Virtuozzo offering in jaguarpc.com with the unmanaged xen VPS
offering. And we wanted a fresh place to kickoff our VSControl software
that took years to develop and perfect. We will begin offering the
software to the public this year. Finally there is a xen based vps
hosting control panel that hosts can rely on.
You have offices in multiple cities and you have also remote technicians all over the world, how do you manage them?
With
our software, and my great management team. If I had to manage a staff
this size on my own it would consume my day. I empower the managers of
the various departments to give them a chance to really make a
difference in peoples lives and in the companies growth.
Do you own your data centers?
Not
yet. We run colo cages, racks, and other specialized agreements with
facilities in Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, the UK, and Singapore.
We are expanding to other cities as well as currently planning our own
facility.
You have a very active community, how did your business benefit from it?
It
hasn’t stopped benefiting from it yet . Our clients are equally as
awesome as our staff. Often clients are eager to learn things for
themselves or just might be curious about something. When they take
those issues to our community not only does it reduce our own support
load, it builds a sense of community, adds content, and perpetuates
itself.
What can we expect from JaguarPC in the future?
We
love taking the lead and pushing boundaries of what defines a product.
We were right out front pushing vps long before most even knew what it
was. In fact I had to request from the owners of WHT
to get vps categories and forums added many years ago. We plan to do
more of the same and push the envelope of whats possible. This year is
no exception, we have some great deals coming very soon made possible
by a few unique partnerships we just finalized.
What does the future hold for Greg Landis?
Only
God knows for certain but I’ll keep doing what I do best. Because its
working for me. I do plan to continue pursuing our larger plans,
building data centers, and diversifying Landis holdings in many other
non-hosting related opportunities as well. So far I’ve been very
fortunate and enjoy spreading it around. Ask me again in another 10yrs