Interview with Greg Landis – JaguarPC CEO

Please tell us a little about yourself.

Im 32, a father of 3, and when I’m not shackled to a desk I enjoy spending time with the family, fishing, and playing guitar. Anyone that knows me will tell you I’m very big on core values in every person we hire, and every project we take on. Core values such as honesty, integrity, and respect are often set aside in the modern world and particularly behind the veil of anonymity of the internet. I believe this is precisely the area where people should adhere to those values the most. If you do, a reference is as easy as saying “google me”.

Can you summarize your educational experience for us?

I graduated high school in 94 and joined the Airforce in 95 where I spent 7yrs learning and growing as a person. I took some college while in the USAF but eventually the demand and excitement of JaguarPC led me to exit the USAF and go at hosting full time.

What do you consider as your accomplishments up to this point?

That I’ve managed to keep a healthy marriage, raise 3 kids, and all while running a very demanding business for 10yrs. Hitting milestones such as 100, 500, 1000 servers has been exciting as well.

Any failures you’d like to tell us about?

Nobody grows as a company or person without some failure. More importantly though is the lessons you take away from the experience. One big failing in the past was letting my excitement get the better of us by not planning properly for our growth. There is no growth worth hurting a reputation built up by a decade of hard work. Now we work our hardest on preserving that ideal.

What is your primary occupation?

Whatever my staff, clients, and partners need from me. I wear the CEO title but the truth is that even with 75 people working for me I still enjoy getting involved in the daily activities where it all got started. Our company is all about reflecting that person touch.

How do you manage your time? Will you describe what you do on a daily and/or weekly basis?

Between my wife and my iPhone I’m able to stay on top of things pretty well most of the time. My week involves a lot of email between my staff, management meetings, networking with other professionals, going over reports from the various areas of our companies, and of course some daily interactions with clients on forums, instant messengers, and the phone.

Do you oversell?

We don’t, except for our shared hosting plans. None of our reseller, VPS, or hybrid plans have any features that are oversold. The shared technology we use and our vast experience lets us manage the shared environments so well that we simply never run into the tiny things some watch all the time like disk space. Simply put, we just can’t run out of disk space. Even as we speak all our clients could increase their usage immediately by 500% and it wouldn’t cause alarm. Like cell phone minutes and bandwidth, the prices of storage are so minute these days its hard to justify placing a limit and letting a 2tb system only collect dust while 80% of the space sits wasted. Overselling as a means of marketing actually is the best way we can tell clients “use more, if you don’t nobody will” . And our system is setup so you have to have 80% of an initial quota actually used before you request more, but you can request more as many times as you want and its automatically added.

Tell us about your control panel, is it based on cPanel and what makes it special?

In our shared environment we use cPanel exclusively, but for VPS, hybrid, and dedicated servers we offer and support a wide range of control panels and software. We have developed a proprietary platform that ties into our servers, billing, software, ips, staff, and pretty much our entire operation. I wouldn’t want to imagine running a company this size and complex without it.

As part of your managed services you propose monitoring, does that include proactive responses?

Yes. And we have some really exciting improvements coming to our operation in the next 30days that will improve that response greatly by adding new methods of alerts and new tools for clients and our staff to respond to those alerts.

You propose VPS solutions on JaguarPC and yet you operate wowvps.com too, why?

Wowvps.com was started off for two reasons; we didn’t want to mix our managed Virtuozzo offering in jaguarpc.com with the unmanaged xen VPS offering. And we wanted a fresh place to kickoff our VSControl software that took years to develop and perfect. We will begin offering the software to the public this year. Finally there is a xen based vps hosting control panel that hosts can rely on.

You have offices in multiple cities and you have also remote technicians all over the world, how do you manage them?

With our software, and my great management team. If I had to manage a staff this size on my own it would consume my day. I empower the managers of the various departments to give them a chance to really make a difference in peoples lives and in the companies growth.

Do you own your data centers?

Not yet. We run colo cages, racks, and other specialized agreements with facilities in Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, the UK, and Singapore. We are expanding to other cities as well as currently planning our own facility.

You have a very active community, how did your business benefit from it?

It hasn’t stopped benefiting from it yet . Our clients are equally as awesome as our staff. Often clients are eager to learn things for themselves or just might be curious about something. When they take those issues to our community not only does it reduce our own support load, it builds a sense of community, adds content, and perpetuates itself.

What can we expect from JaguarPC in the future?

We love taking the lead and pushing boundaries of what defines a product. We were right out front pushing vps long before most even knew what it was. In fact I had to request from the owners of WHT to get vps categories and forums added many years ago. We plan to do more of the same and push the envelope of whats possible. This year is no exception, we have some great deals coming very soon made possible by a few unique partnerships we just finalized.

What does the future hold for Greg Landis?

Only God knows for certain but I’ll keep doing what I do best. Because its working for me. I do plan to continue pursuing our larger plans, building data centers, and diversifying Landis holdings in many other non-hosting related opportunities as well. So far I’ve been very fortunate and enjoy spreading it around. Ask me again in another 10yrs 🙂