Customer Survey 2008

RimuHosting marked its fifth anniversary of hosting with a survey of customers.

The survey was completed by current customers as well as customers who had hosted with us at some point in the last few years.  We had 107 responses to the survey at the time of writing, five days after the survey was created.

Domain Hosting The Most Popular Server Use

We asked if customers were hosting a domain on their server with us.  It came as no surprise to hear that is what 90% of our customers are doing.

How customers use their server

Some examples (where our customers have given permission to mention their sites):

Other Server Uses

We asked how customers were using their server for things other than their website.

Email is a popular use of the server.  Customers have a variety of setups.  Some use spam filtering software or anti-virus software.  Some have a few email accounts, others host email for large groups (e.g. employees, or website users).

Our customers also use their servers for development.  The developers deploying applications for testing.  They run source code repository software like subversion, mercurial, git or CVS.  Customers set up bug tracking software like Trac.

Some customers use their server with as as a utility server.  These kinds of uses include: offsite filestore/backup (e.g. to backup their PC).  Or as a general Unix playground they can ssh into and play around with.

Some excerpts from customers:

RimuHosting Helps Out

We asked if RimuHosting staff had helped out with getting their server up and running.  Here are some of the things people said:

About Our Customers

We asked our customers what they do in their 'regular' nine to five job.

Most of our customers (96%) have a 'technical' (computer related) occupation.  And the most common occupation is software developer (70%).

Many of our customers (38%) run their own business.  And for many their server with us is the public face of that business.

75% of our customers are in the 25-45 age bracket.  About 10% are students.

Customer occupation graph

Some take aways from this:

RimuHosting has always catered to the 'geek' hosting market.  Most of our users are comfortable on the command like.  Faced with a problem they are quite likely to initially try to research a solution and resolve things themselves.  The RimuHosting support team is always on standby to help out when needed.

Consequently we tend not to host too many Mom-and-pop businesses.  Nor do we have too many customers that just needs a few static HTML pages and a web based control panel to manage that site.

Positive Word Of Mouth Main Reason For Hosting With Us

We asked our customers where they had first found out about RimuHosting.  Most heard of us via a link from someone elses site (often a customer of ours mentioning their experience hosting with us) or from a friend's referral.  A tiny percentage also discovered us via an ad (we mainly advertise through google adwords).

It is great for us to see that positive word of mouth is helping to drive our growth.

Referral source

RimuHosting Support

One of the things the staff at RimuHosting work really hard at is trying to provide support and service that will delight our customers.  Our goal is to not just make them happy, but actually surprise them with unexpectedly good service.

Over the years we have received some very kind comments from customers.  We love to receive these emails and notes.  And many of the comments are posted on our testimonials page.

In the survey we asked our customers (and ex-customers) "How happy are you with RimuHosting's Support Responses (Helpful, Friendly, Professional)".  Amazingly 84% of customers were not just happy, but actually delighted with our support.  Stunningly just 1% thought we were merely 'OK' and 0% (not a single unhappy respondent of the 102 responses to that question at the time of writing) rated our support 'Poor'.

Satisfaction with support graph

Over the last 12 months we have doubled the size of our support team.  And we have strengthened the round the clock coverage we provide.  Consequently, 95% of our customers are happy or delighted with the time it takes us to respond to support requests.

Satisfaction with response times graph

Performance And Reliability

We asked our customers how satisfied they were with their server's performance and reliability.  Virtually everyone was more than happy with what they had been receiving.

Performance and reliability graph

That said we are always working to improve the reliability of our servers (e.g. with improved hardware and Xen software) as well as performance (via server load monitoring scripts and followups with customers).

Difference Between RimuHosting And A Previous Host

We asked our customers how our hosting compared to a previous host (if they had come to us from some other hosting provider).

91% of our current and ex-customers rated our hosting better than their previous host.

RimuHosting compared to a previous host graph

We asked customers about some of the differences between us and their previous hosts.  Here is sampling of what they told us:

How Our Customers Describe RimuHosting

We asked the respondees to tell us how they would describe RimuHosting to a friend of theirs needing hosting.  Here is what they told us:

What RimuHosting Customers Think We Do Best

We asked the respondents what they thought we did best:

Responses to 'What Should RimuHosting Do Differently'

We also asked for suggestions on things we could do differently:

These are all great ideas.  And some of the requests are already in our pipeline to implement.  Expect to hear more from us about them soon.