Hriday Biyani on Diadem Technologies and India’s first, API driven, fully automated, web based server management application

“Our newly launched server management module is India’s first and only, API driven server management portal for complete control of our clients dedicated and virtual dedicated servers.” - Hriday Biyani, founder of Diadem Technologies in a conversation with YourStory.

Tell us about Diadem.

Diadem Technologies is a web solutions provider, specializing in web hosting and server management services and enables its clients to have an efficient and effective online presence on a 24x7 basis. The company was founded in the year 1998 and is headquartered in Kolkata. We are currently a team of 12 people.

Over the past few years we have evolved from a plain vanilla shared hosting provider to a full service managed web hosting provider, offering a multitude of hosting solutions which includes shared linux and windows hosting, managed virtual dedicated servers, managed dedicated servers, load balanced solutions, cloud computing services, enterprise email hosting amongst others.

Our newly launched server management module is India’s first and only, API driven server management portal for complete control of our clients dedicated and virtual dedicated servers. This web based utility is the first of its kind offered by an Indian web hosting provider and it brings transparency in our operations and allows our clients to be in complete control of their dedicated and virtual servers.

Tell us about your work experience before starting Diadem.

I have been part of the Internet services industry since the time it was launched in India (the late 1990s before Google existed and Apple was in decline!) and have over a decade of expertise in providing various online services including web hosting, dedicated server management, custom web development and related services.

What circumstances that led to the development of your own server management module?

When we launched our virtual dedicated services in India, we wanted to give our clients the ability to perform regular server management operations from their end would having to open a support ticket for each instance. We also found that no other provider in India was offering this service to its clients and we found this to be a niche which we should focus our efforts on.

As our datacentre had a suite of comprehensive API methods available for their partners to use in developing their custom applications, we wanted to take advantage of the same and have developed our own server management module. This application allows our clients to monitor, manage and request support through a simple web based interface which has been specifically developed keeping in view the needs of organisations that outsource their server hosting requirements to private datacenter providers.

This is probably India’s first, API driven, fully automated, web based server management application and following are some of the key features of this server management application:

?      256-bit SSL encryption is being used rendering all communication between your browser and the server as fully secure.

?      Sensitive data within the application is being encrypted and saved in the DB using a secret encryption key which can only be deciphered from within the application.

?      Servers can be rebooted online. The login details for various applications deployed along with the server hardware details can also be viewed online.

?      Post your support tickets online and each ticket will be archived for future reference.

?      Monitor your server bandwidth usage on a real-time basis with MRTG graphs.

While it has taken us a fair bit of planning and development effort to create this application, we intend to keep improving upon it by adding new features and utilities based upon our clients feedback.

Please describe the platform your product is built on and why you chose that platform.

This application has been developed with Codeigniter (www.codeigniter.com) which is amongst the most popular MVC(Model View Controller) application frameworks for PHP.

The MVC platform is more secure than traditional procedural programming and enables RAD(Rapid Application Development) development methodologies. Also, we wanted to develop this application on an open source platform so LAMP(Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) was our choice for developing this application.

Who are your potential competitors?

Hosting companies which are innovating and offering customised solutions in terms of cloud computing, virtualization, server management and automating deployment and provisioning of hardware and software services are our competitors and this can be of a global nature as well.

What is your revenue model?

Our revenue comes from shared hosting and dedicated server management services. The server management module enables us to reduce this effort and enables our clients to get more control on their servers. We also deploy and manage custom open source applications for our clients like Zimbra, OpenBravo, etc. which we also manage and maintain from our end.

What is your business model?

We are primarily hosting services but we are starting to move up the value chain by offering web based solutions and applications like our server management module, which enables us to position ourselves as a tech oriented hosting services provider.

Tell us about your clients.

We have over 1200 clients for our hosting services and 30+ clients who use the server management module to manage their servers.

Have you received external funding?

No

Do you plan to fund-raise?

At this point of time, we are well funded and can grow with our internal accruals and ongoing revenues. However, if we get a strategic partnership which can enable us to scale our services faster and generate more revenues, we are open to such associations.

Does your product have the potential to be scale globally?

Yes, as it’s a web based module and we offer our services remotely, it can be delivered and used by clients across the globe.

YourStory truly hopes that Diadem goes global. What are your thoughts on this story? Please write to us at [email protected]