A partner in the Pleth Networks high end web hosting and development company, Cotton Rohrscheib is more than just your interesting hosting personality.

He has his hand in a number of different cookie jars including Powersite, Pleth Networks and his own personal blog the Cotton Club.

I was lucky enough to get a few free moments of his time to ask him about the hosting world, alligator fights and everything in between.

What advice would you have for somebody who is just breaking into the web hosting or web development world and wants to get started with their own company or service?

Cotton: I would advise anyone wanting to get into the hosting business to first research out their infrastructure for a while before making a decision. Important factors to look at would be bandwidth, scalability, and backup solutions. With Pleth, we feel that we are positioned well with our hosting infrastructure, we utilize a private rack solution with a 5 day running backup interval. We also are taking advantage of newer technologies like virtualization, etc., which has allowed us to go after the growing VPS market that is starting to emerge stronger than ever.

For anyone wanting to get into the development business I would advise them to sharpen their skillset, I am strong in PHP, and that’s my weapon of choice when building apps. My business partners also have their areas of expertise also, for instance, my partner Greg is a CSS guru and Stephen is our business manager that handles our day to day business stuff. It can be overwhelming for one person to try to do everything, nothing is worse in my opinion than being on line 500 of a piece of code or halfway through a cool flash animation and having to stop to check a clients account balance.

Another piece of advice that we have had to just learn as we go is how to refine our bidding process so that we don’t undersell or undervalue our services. One of the first big projects we took on helped us figure this out the hard way. One other thing that has helped us out is having an extended network of freelance developers that we bring in from time to time to help out on projects. Having been in this business for a while I have a network of contacts that I have worked with off and on for several years on various projects, this has been invaluable.

Who would win in a fight between Bob Parsons of GoDaddy and an alligator?

Cotton: I’m gonna call this one a tie. The gator would likely swallow Bob whole but later get choked on his huge diamond earrings and Bob would crawl out of the Gator with the help of his GoDaddy Girls!

With web hosting support, do you consider it more important to be well prepared with your quick responses in hand, answer each question without the crutch of pre-typed responses, or a mix of using both techniques?

Cotton: When we first got started with Pleth I envisioned us having some type of large FAQ Support Section with advanced ticketing, etc., but learned later that that wasn’t our business model. Most of our clients come to us with their support issues either by telephone or email, and we typically start exploring the issue right away for them.

I don’t think that we would have had the level of client retention we have had over the years had it not been for our accessibility and individualized responses during support issues. Yeah, it takes a lot more work to do it this way but that’s why we charge a little bit more in the end. We try to remedy each clients support requests as quickly as possible and with as much personal service as possible.

You’ve worked on so many different projects in the past, asking you for your favorite might sound kind of silly. Instead, what is one goal, tactic or task you see that any project must do eventually that not many do that well without expertise?

Cotton: My partners and I will usually all go over a new site a few times prior to its launch to check for it’s “flow”, to make sure that everything is easily understandable to the end user. If it is an e-commerce application we usually will go through and make a few test transactions. A lot of times clients come to us with specific ideas as to how they want their site to flow, this can be a two-edged sword.

Ultimately we want our clients to have exactly what they want but if we see a way to enlighten them on a “better way” we try to do so, after all that’s what they are paying us for. A lot of less experienced firms I have found out there today will try to provide their clients with “exactly what they want” instead of “what will actually work”. We look at this as saving our clients the time of having to find out things the hard way. We put a lot of thought into designing a website project, I think that a lot of sites out there today, especially small business websites, aren’t well thought out before they go live.

What is the difference between the hosting the Pleth Networks does and the web host down the street that offers a $1.99 a month plan?

Cotton: Probably the biggest difference with Pleth Clients would be the support that they get from us. All of our clients have access to my partners and I, we are also very responsive to emails sent after hours as well, not that we don’t have lives or anything because we do, but we usually try to put fires out as soon as they come up. We also build relationships with our clients that extend beyond our business services, for instance, one of my clients was in my wedding three years ago, our client retention is phenomenal.

It’s fun for us to watch our clients businesses grow. Another big difference outside of the service realm would probably have to be our network infrastructure, we have larger bandwidth allocations, high end virtualization services and control panels from SWSOFT with manufacturer support. Our NOC is also located at The Planet in Texas, this has served us very well so far, we have contacts there and have even had dialog with their CEO in the past, a lot of these $1.99 a month hosting companies just provide barebones hosting with maybe a generic control panel and ticketing system for support, if that, and expect the customer or end user to do the rest.

99% of our clients don’t have the internal IT infrastructure or knowledge and training required to benefit from this type of solution, they require services from a firm like ours that handles it all, development, software installation, dns, email, etc. We call ourselves a hosting and development firm but we are more of an extension to our clients IT department.