MSP CLOUD STORIES
How Intergen simplified cloud infrastructure and cut cost 78% using Virtuozzo’s MSP Cloud
Intergen Web Solutions is a unique MSP that focuses on white-glove web development, application hosting and supporting digital marketing services.
Founded in 2006 in Milwaukee, Intergen’s team helps small businesses build their presence online, primarily with Joomla, WordPress and G-suite applications. Now Intergen has switched from traditional hosting for its customer projects to using Virtuozzo’s managed MSP cloud – and is realizing significant cost reductions, and speed and simplicity improvements as a result.
“As our company grew, we just kept outgrowing our hosts,” says Brian Mitchell, Founder and President of Intergen Web Solutions. “From the early days, where we’d have small hosting reseller accounts for each project, we moved into dedicated servers, and then VPS, and then we’re spending time working out how to split up and reallocate resources. It gets complex to predict, cost out and manage the infrastructure your customers
“We’re seeing about a 78% reduction in cost with Virtuozzo cloud”
The problem with traditional clouds
Cloud hosting was the obvious next step in that growth journey, and the company set out to look for a containerized cloud hosting solution that would suit its customer projects. However, the established routes to cloud were not necessarily simple, either.
“Even the companies selling cloud want to sell it as monolithic chunks of infrastructure – here are the five boxes you need to set up your private cloud – and then you have this huge investment up front,” Brian says.
“And when you look at the hyperscale clouds, they have seemingly infinite capacity but also complexity, and you have to jump through unnecessary technical hoops to do basic things. Sure, we can work these things out, but we have better things to do – like serving our clients.”
Discovering Virtuozzo’s MSP cloud
Then Intergen discovered Virtuozzo Hybrid Cloud, a managed cloud platform that simplifies cloud infrastructure for the MSP. It brings multiple cloud services together in a single portal, with Infrastructure, Platform, Database, Storage, Kubernetes and WordPress as a Service available on demand, running on infrastructure managed by Virtuozzo’s cloud service provider partners.
Intergen is primarily using Virtuozzo’s Platform as a Service capabilities to host containerized web applications. According to Brian, Virtuozzo’s industry-standard approach makes cloud infrastructure dramatically easier for the Intergen team to spin up and manage
“Everything is focused on industry standards, so there was zero learning curve for my team. You need to know a little bit about Linux, and it helps to understand how containers work, but Virtuozzo even abstracts a lot of that concern away. You just create the environment, a container for the web server, a container for the database, and it’s ready to go,” he says.
Reducing infrastructure costs by 78%
However, where Virtuozzo really shines for Intergen is in its scalable pricing model. A cloudlet (the basic unit of compute and storage) is tiny, and this enables Intergen to grow its infrastructure to match customer requirements while only paying for the resources actually consumed.
“We’re seeing about a 78% reduction in cost with Virtuozzo cloud. If I’m onboarding two new clients, we just pay for two clients’ worth of resources. I don’t need to guess how much RAM or CPU the server needs now, or in the future. I just set a minimum and maximum amount, and only get billed for what I actually use.”
For Brian, this true pay-per-use price model is superior to unpredictable hyperscale cloud bills, or traditional VPS hosting. Infrastructure growth is incremental and the savings can be put to use for the business.
“Using Virtuozzo cloud reduces our costs, so of course our margin gets a lot better – but more importantly, I can invest those savings in my team, the good people that serve our customers,” he says.
“I’ve never had an interest in running a datacenter. I just want to take care of my customers. We abstract web application complexity for our clients; Virtuozzo abstracts infrastructure complexity for us. This is the problem that Virtuozzo has solved beautifully,” Brian concludes.
For more information visit intergen.org to learn more about Intergen Web Solutions, or learn more and take a free trial of Virtuozzo Hybrid Cloud.
