Owner’s First Blog

Hello from Austin, Texas! We’re finally getting some rain around here and the lakes are back up to normal levels. For us Austinites that’s great news! Hop on your boats and lets all go water skiing! Everyone but tech support of course… sorry but you gotta man those phones!

Hi, my name is Tamara Field and I am the President of Apollo Hosting, Inc. I have wanted to start this blog for quite a while now. In 1999 when I started this company, it was my philosophy and the philosophy of the company that our customers are our main priority. And keeping them informed should be part of my job. So, I will make this blog a priority, and hopefully I can help you in some small way with your online experience. And I do hope that you will give me your questions/feedback whenever you can.

I started Apollo Hosting in 1999 in the home office of our home in Yorktown, VA. I was management, tech support, billing, … basically I did it all! Of course, we didn’t have many customers yet. Since then my husband Martin has joined the company as our CEO, we have moved our company to Austin, Texas, hired around 30 fabulous employees, leased a new data center, built a brand new building to house our administrative offices, added many more services like VPS, Dedicated, and more recently Windows Hosting.

And we are only beginning to scratch the surface! There are so many more exciting offerings that we are planning on launching in the next few months. If only I could tell you about all of them!! (Wouldn’t our competition love that!) But, I will let you in on one of them (I can spill the beans, I am the President after all!): We are working with Microsoft and hope to be offering Exchange and Sharepoint hosting to our customers within the next couple of months. Many of our small business customers have asked us for collaboration software such as these. We did our research and after about 6 months decided on these two Microsoft products. They are powerful, user friendly, and Microsoft has setup their products to work very effectively in a hosted environment.

What does this mean for you? Well, if you have been looking into adding an IT Staff, or currently have one, you could save a bundle by using hosted versions of software such as this instead of doing it in-house.

That brings me to the new and exciting part of Web 2.0. This is SAAS (Software as a Service) which is finally becoming a viable option for small companies.

Remember back in the beginning of the Web how exciting it was that finally the small company could compete side by side with the big players? Well, SAAS is going to do it all over again! You may have heard this term before, but until now it really wasn’t feasible since many people were still using dial-up access to the Internet. Now that most individuals and companies have some sort of broad band connection to the Internet whether they have cable or DSL, SAAS is making a huge come-back. And we are planning on being at the front of the pack.

The thought of the day that I would like to leave you with is this:

There’s a new book out that I love called ‘A Perfect Mess’. The authors basically say that “moderately disorganized people, institutions, and systems frequently turn out to be more efficient, more resilient, more creative, and in general more effective than highly organized ones” Even better, they have proof!

I love this book!!

Relax and enjoy the ride!

Tamara Field