Like many others I seem to be having a problem getting a response from Aletia regarding a problem that admittedly seems to be of my own making (forgot password to renew expired domain so it's very urgent but my fault).

For more than three days, I've been sending emails trying to get a response but to no avail. So, being a project manager for AT&T, I wonder how well they are equiped to handle their business.

So I sit down to try to do some math:

I'm taking a stab in the dark but Aletia has 2100 people with member IDs. Assuming new customers are instantly added but attritioned customers take a little longer to be removed, they likely have about 2037 paying customers.

I assume the model is no different than any other business that serves both private and corporate sectors, the 80% or so private consumers probably spend a paultry $14.00 per month or so while about 15% are corporate customers or enhanced private sector customers spending about $18.00 per month. This leaves the remaining 5% who are business customers who drop an insance amount of money without even thinking about it. They have the most expensive hosting plan, they add and remove scripts, go over their bandwidth, need extra server space and so on. They are the bread and butter of any business and likely when the average Joe like me talks about how I haven't heard anything on my issue, these guys are being coddled and rightly so.

These business customers probably drop an around $100 per month.

Remember this is just an slightly educated guesstimate. In addition, they make some money from script installations, additional bandwidth, disk space, certifications, bla, bla. But I'm guessing Aletia probably only makes an extra $1.50 per month, per customer from these things and the big dogs probably don't pay this so it only applies to 80% of the customer base.

Then you have new domains, renewals and the like. Although Aletia charges for these, most of this revenue is probably divided between them, Internic and who ever else get's a piece of that pie. Since every one pays at least $10 a year for one domain but many of us have multiple domains and there are new reservations that are more than $10 per year, I'm guessing Aletia get's about $3 per month per customer for this.

So, we have 1630 customers paying approximately $18.50 per month. Then there's the 15% (305) that pay about $35.00 per month. Finally, the big dogs - 102 of them that pay about $100.00 per month. That's $51,030 per month EBIT. Minus taxes would make it around $36,500. Minus overhead not including payroll or taxes - take off about 10k. They have what, 7 employees or so? Consider an average salary of $30k per year plus SSN, Insurance, Federal and personal benefits would be about 23k per month.

That leaves about $3,500 profit. While this leaves enough to hire someone else, doesn't someone need a net profit?

Feedback is welcome, I'll change my formula as appropriate but it looks like Aletia is probably running on a pretty thin profit margin.

With that being said Aletia - even so, three and a half days is long enough. Resolve my ticket!

Thanks,
Shane