Memset® Ltd.
For as long as I can remember, I have loved technology and always wanted to be an entrepreneur. In mid-2002 I co-founded Memset® Dedicated Server Hosting with my brother Nick. Nick provides the deep technical skills we need such as for our key product, Miniserver™ Virtual Machines, a virtual dedicated server solution based on the powerful Xen technology. He is our Technical Director, and I run the company day-to-day as Managing Director. Memset® is now one of the UK's leading Web & IT hosting providers.
In case you are thinking "what on earth is hosting?", all Web sites and Internet services have to be hosted on a physical computer (a server) somewhere. What Memset® does is provide those dedicated servers (in our Reading data centre sites) along with the connectivity and services such as firewall & DoS protection, security vulnerability assessment & scanning and 24/7 proactive service monitoring necessary for our customers to host their online applications.
Thus far, Memset® has been a huge success. We are one of the fastest growing IT companies in the UK (part of the Deloitte UK Fast 50) and have remained profitable and debt free. I attribute our success to our simple customer value proposition: we are the cheapest and the best business host in Britain.
Before you say "yeah, right", we are currently the cheapest provider of virtual servers in the UK (cheaper than Amazon EC2 as well), and we have been voted the UK's Best Web Host for the last four years running by PCPro magaine!
You might wonder how have we managed to be cheap and good, certainly a feat few companies manage. I believe the answer is simple. Memset® is owned by its founders (my brother Nick and me) not profiteering shareholders. Further, we are not venture-capital backend so are not pressurised into bleeding our customers for every last penny and only employing the cheap-and-stupid. Second, Nick and I both have backgrounds in software design and have instilled a corporate philosophy of "automate everything". We only recruit smart people, since when you give a smart person a dull, repetitive task, they automate it. Third, we are green, which means we are efficient, which means our costs are reduced. We take advice from the likes of Romonet on data centre cost and energy-efficiency.
Memset®'s Guildford team
Other ventures
Although Memset® is my primary focus, I do have various other business interests and ideas. Some fall within Memset® 's umbrella, such as our new automatic backup service, SquirrelSave while others are more "spare time" business activities. A recent example of the latter is helping a friend to setup a touring motorbike rental company, New Horizons Bike Hire.
New Horzons' main bikes
We recently
purchased the URL shortening service is.gd, and will continue to support it
as a free service indefinitely, while providing resources to develop the service.
The future
For the time being, Memset® is my primary devotion, but I have no doubt that within a few years I will be looking for a new challenge. My hopes are to be a serial entrepreneur since I can think of few jobs more rewarding than nurturing and breathing life into a small company which then goes on to provide employment and contributes to the UK's business success.
As well as my interests in computing and information technology, I have an abiding fascination with Biomedical science and one day hope to return to that field or even perhaps combine the two in a new business venture.
Representation
Recently, my business networking has given me the chance to start to help represent both local business and IT business on a national level, and I am grabbing this new challenge with huge enthusiasm!
