From zero to hero in a crowded IT market in 31 months

The Czech hosting market has seen WEDOS in 2010. The entire market was already divided and the competition laughed at us, saying we had no chance of even surviving.

Within 31 months we became number one. Since then we have been growing and currently, more Czech domains are directed to our two private data centres than to the next three competitors combined. Globally, we have almost 310,000 customers from 150 countries.

How did we manage that?

We knew that most of the competition was stagnating.

For a customer to switch to us and be satisfied, we will have to deploy quality services. Furthermore, a service with parameters that they need not only now but will also be sufficient in a few years. Something that will not only win them over to us but also make them a fan.

We resolved the quality issue thanks to our industry experience. We knew what hardware to choose, how it would scale in the future, and what its strengths and weaknesses were. Of course, this meant not only visiting manufacturers but also thoroughly testing everything ourselves.

Our team consists not only of experienced IT professionals who gained experience in the 1990s, but also of young people who follow trends and enjoy trying new things. We knew the communities of potential customers, we knew what they used and what troubled them.

To attract attention, we exploited the biggest weakness in the market at the time, which was that nobody dared to show how it was actually done. Everyone guarded their know-how, didn't want to show their behind-the-scenes workings, or appear much in public. We approached everything as a big reality show.

However, all of this is not enough. You need to get people to try you out. Here, we gambled on price. We calculated how much turnover we needed to achieve with 20,000 services for it to make sense. We reduced the price by choosing suitable technologies, which are more expensive but more economical, and by automating processes.

The result of this was a revolution in the Czech hosting market. We concentrated on further growth and cost optimisation.

We **own** everything, including the infrastructure, buildings and the people who manage them. We also have our own kilometres of optical fibre routes, which we dug and blew ourselves. We designed and built the second data centre ourselves. To save on cooling, the servers are cooled in oil baths and the waste heat is used to heat the building, car park and a nearby municipal swimming pool.

And we will repeat all of this globally with our WEDOS Global network, which protects millions of websites from attacks for a few hundred crowns per month.