You’ll frequently find Cloudnet founders Anders Brundin and Magnus Appelquist filling their lungs with crisp air snowboarding the soft-powder slopes somewhere high in the Alps. You might also find them—along with members of their team—retreating in the sun or surfing on the shores of Spain. Living life to the fullest is one of the uncompromisable principles upon which Anders and Magnus founded their managed hosting company in 2010.
Another of Cloudnet’s uncompromisable principles is providing exceptional customer service to its customers who include web designers and application developers around the world. The Sweden-based company focuses on making life easier for developers by providing managed hosting for WordPress, PHP, Node.js, Java, and Python. Companies looking for trouble-free experiences at a predictable cost turn to Cloudnet to deploy business-critical web sites or apps on its high-performing and reliable platform.
“Most developers and design firms we work with want to focus on developing, not operating,” explained Anders. “Even if they have the skills and ability to do system administration, they would rather not have to waste their time on it. Cloudnet does that for them. We deal with monitoring, backup, support, updates and upgrades, and more.”
“The developers we serve just want to develop, and their customers just want a good website—neither wants to host and worry about operations performance,” added Magnus. “That’s the gap we fill: premium hosting for business-critical websites and applications.”
Cloudnet customers receive access to a team of DevOps for help with troubleshooting, configuration, and performance issues at no additional cost. The company is known for its quick response to inquiries and proactively alerting customers to potential issues and solutions that could help improve their sites and apps. In addition, Cloudnet provides free migration of existing sites to its platform, DNS services, and no-cost testing environments during development.
So how is it possible for the Cloudnet team to provide exceptional service and still have lives outside of work? Anders and Magnus say the answer lies in how you architect your service, the culture you instill, and the partners you choose.
Both Anders and Magnus started their careers as consultants. With that experience, they developed a compulsion to solve IT problems more quickly. “When we started Cloudnet, we were determined to run a tight ship, with a service architecture that was structured, updated, and configured in the best possible way,” recalled Anders. “We wanted to automate everything as much as possible so that we could scale well with a small staff and still maintain good support to our customers—and still go home at a reasonable hour.”
“That’s why our technology choices are critical to our service philosophy,” continued Magnus. “Everything behind the scenes has to be automated as much as possible and in perfect shape. That’s what enables us to give very personalized, customized, proactive service to our customers.”
When it comes to choosing its cloud partners, support is what Cloudnet values most.
“We’ve tried all the providers there are, and Linode has been the most stable and best suited for us,” said Anders. “We’ve met the people at Linode, we’ve been to their offices, and from the beginning, we had a great technician-to-technician connection. It has always been obvious that they know what they are doing, and they have the same kind of service philosophy that we do. If we don’t get the personal touch, it doesn’t work for us.”
After starting in the Linode data center in London, Cloudnet’s multicloud strategy now includes Linode’s data centers in Frankfurt and Newark, depending on what makes the most sense for their customers’ primary audiences and data sovereignty requirements. In the service mix are Linodes, some Dedicated CPUs, and an occasional bit of load balancing.
“We try to keep everything as simple as possible—easy, understandable, and manageable,” explained Magnus. “Our typical customer has one VM on one server. If there is ever a performance issue, we deal with one server and one customer, and we never have to deal with a bunch of customers being impacted by a crisis at the same time.”
“If there ever is a problem, we know the Linode team,” reiterated Anders. “We have their phone numbers and strong assurance of being able to reach someone who will really care. That’s what allows us to pursue our passions like traveling, hiking, snowboarding, and surfing.”
