Interview: Haralds Jass, Founder & CEO, Superb Internet Corporation   Superb Internet is a long-established web hosting company that operates out of Vancouver, Canada and Washington, DC. Regularly ranked among the top hosts in the world, their CEO recently sat-down with HostIndex.com to talk about their new plans. Announced in September, Superb intends to incorporate Miva Merchant with their hosting packages for no additional fee. HostIndex.com: Is Superb Internet seeing a shift within the SME hosting marketplace in terms of product demands being placed on web hosts? Haralds Jass: Over the last seven years we have seen a consistent move in terms of customer expectations -- customers expect more and more and yet still again more from their hosting company, in terms of the scope and quality of services. As competition has increased over the years, so has the number of hosting options for customers. What customers expect are all the options and prices offered by the providers currently in the process of a quick market-share grab (whose support & service quality and longevity, more often that not, is rather questionable), combined with industry leading support and reliability. Customers are always in a relentless search of perfection: the best services and prices, combined with the best QoS and support. We believe that we come as close to that ideal as possible, in terms of offering the best balance of price and service/support quality (we always put the latter - quality of service and support - first); hence our motto, "Ahead of the Rest"(R).   $2.95 Web Hosting - HOSTING SALE ON NOW! HostIndex.com: Could you describe your new partnership with Miva? How does this expanded relationship provide Superb Internet with a competitive advantage? Haralds Jass: We are the first and only full service, fully managed hosting provider to offer Miva Merchant bundled with all our hosting accounts. Now, customers no longer have to pay a premium to use the Miva Merchant shopping cart! Even smaller customers, who do not have a full-scale E-commerce site, can now use Miva. So, now a customer can come to us and no matter what fully virtual or better hosting option they select, get Miva Merchant included -- the full ($595) version, absolutely free! They can use it as they please, be it for a commerce site, or as a catalogue for a site offering information or products at no charge, or any one of the numerous other uses it can be utilized for. HostIndex.com: When it comes to bundling Miva e-commerce capabilities with all your plans, how does Superb Internet intend to make it easy to implement. In short, e-commerce can be tricky; how will you get all your customers to truly take advantage of it? Haralds Jass: We provide a full range of complementing services: HTTPS (SSL) service is optional for some and included for most hosting accounts, InstantSSL certificates are available at only $49 (and included at no charge in our commerce accounts), and a number of merchant account & online payment processing gateway options are provided. We stay beside our customers in their path to E-commerce, all the way from A to Z. We offer a comprehensive range of E-commerce services, so each customer can use as many or as few of them as they need, depending on how established they already are. HostIndex.com: Superb Internet currently offers EasySite, which enables individuals to build a website through a template-driven online system. Does Superb Internet intend to extend Miva e-commerce into this platform? Haralds Jass: Not at this time, as EasySite is mostly used for simple personal or "brochure-ware" sites. Customers using EasySite do not seem to be interested in or ready for E-commerce. At least, at this time... but, we are and will be evaluating offering Miva Merchant with EasySite continuously, and when and if sufficient interest is present, we will work on providing that option. HostIndex.com: Superb Internet recently announced a significant reduction in bandwidth charges. Does operating your own data centre enable your company to be more competitive in its' colocation and bandwidth pricing? Haralds Jass: Yes. Instead of buying bandwidth from a tier 2 or tier 3 provider (a data centre operator), we buy it directly from the world's leading tier 1 backbones. Given our high volume of bandwidth and the direct relationships, we are able to pass on our savings to our customers directly, while smaller hosts who colocate their servers at others' facilities see the facility operators absorb most of such benefits that they get and have very little if any such benefit left to pass on to their end customers. It simply makes sense to have a more direct relationship, as then the benefits such as this are passed on faster and in a greater scale, not to mention, the quality and reliability of the network is much higher. HostIndex.com: When companies are building e-commerce sites (e.g. Miva); what are the biggest differences between choosing a shared versus dedicated platform? Is there a certain point when moving to a dedicated server becomes necessary? Haralds Jass: The point is one of size: when a company's traffic volume starts to exceed the limits of shared hosting, it should move to dedicated hosting to ensure that it has the capability to handle all the customers' orders quickly and efficiently. In fact, even if the volume is not quite at that level, it is still best to have dedicated hosting – always best to prepare for more customer orders than expected, vs. having to turn away some customers due to poor planning. Dedicated is also an extremely favourable option for sellers who need a great amount of flexibility in terms of custom server set-up -- it is much easier and faster to customize things on a dedicated server. Another factor is privacy & data security: if the organization is bound by strict regulations, be it internal or external, that prohibit its data being on the same server as any others' data/access resides on, again they would need a dedicated server. A dedicated hosting solution is ultimately the best for any E-commerce site -- if the business can afford it and justify it in terms of the volumes of sales; it is a more reliable (not dependant on any other users, as it is on a shared server -- e.g. if one site becomes the attack of a DoS attack, everyone on the shared server suffers), performs better (no others on the server, resources are dedicated to the one site entirely), has a higher level of security, and also is more customizable. Interview Date: October 1st, 2002.