Earlier this month, Vivio’s President, Mark Keymer, was interviewed by HostAdvice.

Can you tell us something about the beginning of the company? When it was founded? What was the idea behind it?

Vivio Technologies was originally created in 2002 to be the company around a traffic exchange site. We worked on that product for the first several years and had some success with it. But we kept running into problems with the hosting companies that hosted our sites. This dissatisfaction led us to start hosting our own server, and over time, other people would ask us if we could host them. We understood the frustrations with hosting because we had experienced our own frustration with many providers. So we decided to start hosting others and offering the services that we couldn’t get from other providers.

Having a strong company environment is very important for each company. What are the core values of Vivio Technologies that drive the company toward success?

Honesty in our interactions and how we communicate is important to us. We want to provide great products and excellent support services. We put a lot of our focus on supporting our clients both on the infrastructure side and with our professional services, or what we call SysOps Support. We’re a little bit “small town” in our approach to support. Our clients can still call us on the phone!

What are the products and services that Vivio Technologies is offering at the moment?

Our most popular hosting product is our VPS(VM/Cloud) servers and our professional services product called SysOps Support. But we also offer Shared, Colocation, and custom bare metal servers. We support most hosting environments that support everything from WordPress to .net apps. And we offer both Lucee and Adobe ColdFusion, so we have a bit of a niche in CFML hosting.

There are many people who don’t know anything about hosting websites, but they are in need of this service. What is your approach with those customers?

First, we ask questions to find out what they need. For example, if they’re a developer and need to get hosting to put up their site, we will work to find the solutions that will support what they’ve developed. I tend to start with smaller solutions that can grow. I see no point in paying for a big solution that you’re not going to use.

Customer satisfaction is very important for the general success of the company. How is Vivio Technologies handling customer satisfaction?

Overall, we’ve had great success with customer satisfaction. After all, one of our core values is to provide excellent support. Of course, we can’t please everyone, but we try to do our best. Over the years, we’ve been able to do much of our business through word-of-mouth. And many of our clients have been with us for a long time. We’re proud of that.

What happens when a huge surge of traffic occurs? How is your company making sure that the speed of the websites of its customers is unchanged?

Nothing is ever 100%; if a surge in traffic is causing problems for a client, we have a few options that we can provide. We can increase the server resources to help give relief. We also can look into the traffic itself and see what type of traffic it is. If the traffic is a DDOS, we can work to mitigate the attack and will often recommend a free product like Cloudflare that can help. Through our SysOps Support, we can investigate some of the problem areas on the server and make improvements to help handle the load. Although the effects of having a slow website can be the same, the solutions can vary.

Many companies are introducing cryptocurrency as a payment method. What is your opinion on this matter, and how is this affecting the hosting industry?

At this time, we do not take cryptocurrency as a payment method. It might be something that we accept in the future. I haven’t seen much on the current trends for hosting companies and accepting payment with cryptocurrency, so I don’t have much to add about that. I have seen crypto mining take off and talked with people that want to set up colocation mining rigs. Our power rates have been the biggest drawback for that type of setup. So we typically haven’t been a good option for people wanting to mine.

There are new technologies, trends, products, and services in the hosting industry almost every year. What new technologies and trends do you find particularly interesting these days? What are your plans for introducing these new technologies to your customers?

I have always enjoyed hardware. I’m planning for some new hardware-based solutions to help companies take what they already have and have it simply work faster. Yes, rebuilding a more optimized site is usually a better solution, but sometimes you just need something faster now. I hope to launch faster compute options later this year.

In your opinion, what are the most important things for one web hosting provider?

Helping the customer find the right solutions and being honest about what that solution is and what it includes is essential. Not everyone needs help with management, but for those that do, following up with services that help provide management and support of that service is also important.

Where do you see Vivio Technologies 5 years from now?

We’ll still provide custom hosting solutions and “small-town” support for our customers, and we’ll still answer the phone.

Finally, is there anything about the products or services of your company that we didn’t cover that you would like to share with our readers?

We’re real people, and we’re here to help our customers. My team and I are happy to talk with anyone about how we can help you with your web hosting.