AlchemyWorx with Alan Weinkrantz

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Alan: This is Alan Weinkrantz for dedicatedhost.com I’m here with Dela Quist who’s CEO of Alchemy Worx in London.  Welcome.

Dela: Thank you, hi.

Alan: And tell us a little about Alchemy Worx, what do you do?

Dela: Alchemy Worx is a digital marketing agency with a difference, and that difference is that we have a 100 percent focus on email.  We provide every service… every service that a brand or company might need to do a great job in internet marketing on an out-source basis.  There are two exceptions to that.  We are predominantly involved in retention rather than acquisition, so we don’t do data.  All our clients already have a list of their existing client base and they just want to do a better job at email marketing.  And the other thing we don’t do is we don’t do software, so we really don’t care what platform our clients use to deploy their campaigns, we just do it for them.  The analogy is kind of they buy the bus and we drive it.  I first looked at dedicated hosting probably about five years ago when the business was a lot smaller than it is today, and originally what we wanted was we wanted a secure environment to host our website and we also host landing pages from emails for our clients.  And we also host secure forms for data capture for some of our clients as well.  And as a small business I didn’t have… buying a server was easy, but the big challenge was I didn’t have the internal resource – IT resource – to guarantee that the servers would be up enough for me to guarantee or feel comfortable that I was giving a good service to my client.  But I did a bit of research and I found that there were dedicated hosting companies out there that for very reasonable price would provide the service that I needed, and almost… I signed up almost immediately and we switched our website onto the dedicated host… or the dedicated server pretty immediately and got the security that we needed. And to be honest I didn’t have to increase my IT head count by one percent even, we were able to deal with it.  And that was fantastic.  The second part, which is kind of not something that I necessarily thought about up front is scalability, and we’ve actually upgraded twice in the last five years.  The first time was to a slightly bigger server, and more recently in the last three or four months we made a decision to back up our production so that… But it was an extremely painless experience – we ran the two servers, the old and the new, in parallel for a while.  We were able to run them both for long enough to be confident that everything was working on the new server… migrated across and switched the other one off – it was as painless as it’s possible to be.

Alan: So you’re based here in London but you have clients all over the world.  And how do we… how do people find you on the internet?

Dela: The URL for Alchemy Worx is www.alchemyworx.com spelt with an “x” so www.a-l-c-h-e-m-y-w-o-r-x.com.

Alan: Thank you so much for your time today.

Dela: You’re welcome, it’s been a pleasure.