Interview With Alex Melen - Founder Of T35 FREE Web Hosting

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Alex Melen
Alex has been running a very successful FREE Web Hosting business for over 10 years now, providing unlimited FREE Web Hosting to more than 600,000 Web Sites which isn’t surprising when you see he has a Alexa ranking of 7000! He speaks to us about what he has learned over the past 10 years in the industry and offers some great advice for anyone who wants to start their first website.

1) Tell us about your main project, T35 Hosting ? Why did you launch T35 Hosting ? Where are you at now with T35 Hosting ?

T35 Hosting was one of the first businesses that I launched – The initial concept dates back to 1997, and it was officially launched in 1999. The idea behind T35 Hosting is almost the same today as it was back in 1997: To provide a quick, easy and free way to create a website (and a web presence) on the internet. To give some context, T35 Hosting was founded around the same time as FortuneCity, Geocities, Hypermart, Xoom and Crosswinds. From that list, only Geocities (now part of Yahoo), FortuneCity and T35 are still around offering free web hosting. Over the years we have added more features and have adapted our business to the changing market place (which is what helped us stay in business while so many others have failed). In 2002 we launched paid hosting plans that offered members, that outgrew the basic features of free hosting, the ability to switch to something more advanced while at the same time staying with the service they have grown to know and trust. Our motto has always been and continues to be: “We help you succeed”. We continue to follow that model and adjust our services and plans to the changing needs of our customers - always aiming to help them succeed with their own sites.

2) I understand that you have over 600,000 free hosting customers and a few thousand paid hosting customers, what advice would you give a young entrepreneur trying to build a membership of any kind?

Attempting to build a large membership base is never an easy task. My best advice is to be very patient, getting thousands of members/customers will in most cases not happen overnight. As long as your product/service is something good, word-of-mouth advertising will eventually spread and your membership base will begin to grow. At T35 Hosting, our marketing/advertising budget has always been pretty small (especially compared to our competitors) primarily because of how many customers we get from current customer referrals and general word-of-mouth advertising. This is especially relevant in today’s environment where something as simple as a “signed up with t35 hosting” posted on twitter can get you hundreds of customers.

3) Your website has an incredible today's alexa ranking of 7000! How have you been able to achieve such a high rate of traffic? What advice would you give a young entrepreneur trying to market their website?

Having our service around for over a decade has definitely helped the Alexa ranking. All the backlinks and bookmarks add up and we get thousands of visitors a day just from bookmarks or direct type-in’s. Starting a new site from scratch would obviously take a lot more effort to get that much traffic (and to get ranked that high). I have a strong belief that if your product or idea is unique enough and good enough, the traffic (and alexa ranking) will build over the months.

4) Why should people use T35 over any other FREE host? What do you offer that makes your service better than your competition?

As our motto suggests, we help our customers succeed. We take a very personal and transparent approach to our hosting. We have for almost a decade had a webmaster forum - I personally visit the forum twice a day to help customers out with things ranging from web design, to help monetizing their site. Although the forum is moderated, it’s very open and almost nothing is censored or restricted. This leads to customers helping each other and having a place to discuss website ideas and struggles. At the same time it’s also a place where highly experienced staff (and myself) are there to assist as often as possible. We also feature a 16 hours/day live chat from our home page on which I also try to get on at least an hour or two a day to personally talk to the customers. I believe this kind of personal touch is what has always made our service unique (as most hosts don’t offer any kind of support on free hosting) and continues to help us grow.

5) You have been online offering hosting from 1997, what is your top tip for running a successful hosting company in 2009?

Having gone through the high flying dot-com days, the collapse of the dot-com bubble, and now the current recession, I have definitely learned many important lessons. If I had to give one recommendation it would be to keep away from trying to match your competitors blow for blow with all the crazy things they try to do. In the dot-com days, it was over-leveraging yourself and creating unsustainable business models just because your competitors were doing so. In today’s market I have noticed a similar occurrence where the space and bandwidth offered by hosts double on an almost monthly basis, while prices continue to come down. It’s unrealistic to think that you can offer 1 TB of space for just $2/month. I understand the basic concept behind those kind of offerings (hoping that the customers don’t use all the space/bw you offer), but it is ultimately a flawed business model. The way to beat your competitors is to offer something unique instead of trying to see who can offer the lowest price before going out of business. If you have a unique feature or service, you can take the competition off pricing, and while your competitors will be bringing prices down, you can actually increase your prices as you can attract people with your value-added products & services (instead of rock-bottom-pricing).

6) Do you think that entrepreneurialism is something that is in your blood? Or is it something that can be learned?

Great question … I’ve heard people on both sides of this discussion and I’m probably somewhere in the middle. I do believe that you have to have that certain drive and ambition to be able to be an entrepreneur. At the same time, I believe many people already have that (at least a little bit) and just need to be motivated or presented with the right opportunity.

7) Is there anyone that you look up to and model yourself on? (You can name more than one)

No, I enjoy meeting lots of people from different industries and professions. I think there is a little bit to learn from everyone you meet.

8) Do you have any favorite business related or entrepreneur related books that you can recommend to other entrepreneurs?

Although I probably shouldn’t say this, I feel like a lot of books are outdated even as they come out. Obviously there are a lot of important entrepreneurial and business lessons that are timeless, but there are also many that aren’t. With an internet business, everything moves at the speed of light and I would recommend people to join and participate in online forums and try to keep up with what people in the industry are saying and writing. Most of these discussions and ideas later make it into books, but this way you get to see it months or years before it ever makes it to your local B&N.

10) What advice would you give to a Young Entrepreneur setting up their first business?

My best advice would be to never give up – just because one idea failed doesn’t mean the second or the third one will. I personally worked on several web projects before succeeding with T35 Hosting. In fact, the domain for T35, was taken from a top sites list (top 35 sites) that I ran previous to the hosting business. (I kept the domain for hosting because the short 3 character domain allowed users to have short http://user.t35.com usernames).

11) How many hours do you work daily and what are your daily tasks for your sites?

After over a decade, most of the T35 Hosting tasks have been automated and I don’t get involved in most of the day-to-day operations. I usually spend 3 - 4 hours a day just checking on things, researching new opportunities, talking to customers and just making sure everything runs smoothly. The rest of the time I spend on several other projects I have going on and helping other entrepreneurs and business get off the ground.

12) If the Internet had not existed - what do you think you would be doing?

That’s a tough question to answer, but to be fair, I was involved in many non-internet based entrepreneurial activities when I was younger, so I’m sure I would wind up going down the same entrepreneurial road.

13) What do you like best about the Internet?

It’s the reason we are in a so called “information age”. The internet gives you access to any piece of information at almost any time. At the same time, it allows you to publish any information you want at almost no cost (cough cough T35’s free web hosting) and let’s the entire world see what you published. Imagine how long it would take just a decade ago to share pictures with a relative on a different continent?

14) What do you like least about the Internet?

Unlike a business in the non-internet world, an online business has to operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. While at first that seems like a good thing, it often has its downsides. You’re pretty much always open for business: whether its 3am in the morning or Christmas Eve you’ll always have customers who need support, technical issues on the backend and other issues to deal with.

15) Have you any plans (personal or business) that you can share with us about your future plans / goals / lifetime goals?

You can check out my blog at Web Hosting Mind to check out all the things that go on behind the scenes at T35, as well as my other projects and anything new that I’m working on.

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