The service of servers

When Steven Eschweiler started a company with some buddies from high school, offering hosting for websites from the basement of a house in St. Petersburg, he didn't think it would last long. “I thought it was something I would do until a real job came upon me,” he says.

What Eschweiler couldn't imagine was that the company, Hivelocity, would become one of the fastest growing technology companies in Florida, with 25% annual year-over-year growth.

Hivelocity has come a long way from its basement beginnings in 2002. It now operates in a 30,000-square-foot facility, with 45 employees and eight figures of annual revenue. “It's been a nice ride,” Eschweiler says. He has since graduated to become the company's director of operations.

The company started as a shared hosting service for websites. But as the customer base grew, its needs became more complicated, and Hivelocity's customers started requesting their own — or dedicated — servers. The company realized the move made sense, shifting its revenue model from hosting, which brings in around $10 a month per customer, to providing servers, which can range from $100 to $1,000 a month per customer, depending on a client's needs, Eschweiler says. But space was an issue. “When you're offering dedicated servers, it doesn't take long to fill up a closet.”

The company rented space from a competing data center for awhile in Tampa. In 2010, it got its own place, and took over Road Runner's facility just north of Tampa International Airport. Upgrading the facility took more than a year; Hivelocity added more cooling, power and redundant power to keep the facility running, even during an emergency.

Once the facility was ready in 2011, the company moved its servers at night, 100 at a time. Moving all 3,000 servers took four months. The company just finished a 15,000-square-foot expansion this past January and the team is now seeking a second facility in another area, Eschweiler says.

The company has also expanded its services. Now one of its customers in more than 137 countries can go on the company's website and customize everything from storage to the operating system for its dedicated server. Hivelocity can have the custom-built server up and ready in four hours. “That's our bread and butter,” Eschweiler says.

Hivelocity also offers a public cloud solution, called Sparknode. The third new service the company offers is physical space leasing in the datacenter to provide infrastructure for companies that want the security, power and remote hands available to keep servers running smoothly.

One of the company's biggest challenges in the beginning was breaking into a capital-intensive industry. Data center companies have to invest millions to build the infrastructure, without seeing a return until eight or 12 months down the road.

The challenge today is keeping up with technology. “What's bleeding edge today is old hat tomorrow,” Eschweiler says. If you don't dedicate resources to following the trends, “it's easy to become irrelevant,” he adds. Out of the company's 45 employees, the last 10 people hired have been for research and development, and the company would like to hire 10 more in the next year, Eschweiler says.

Hivelocity competes with big names like Rackspace (a large public company) and SoftLayer, which was recently acquired by IBM. “The nice thing about competing with the IBMs of the world is that some big companies are not as known for customer service, or paying attention to the little guy. Getting a person on the phone can be a challenge,” according to Eschweiler. Hivelocity differentiates itself by providing better customer service and offering the hybrid option of servers, cloud storage and server space leasing, he says. This allows it to keep clients as their needs grow.

“I feel more agile than our competitors,” Eschweiler says. “We are big enough to provide any solution, but we are small enough that every customer counts.” And paying attention to the little guys is just as important, he says. “The more success our customers find, the more servers they'll need. If we give them a solution designed to help them find success, it comes back and pays us in dividends.”