Private Company vs. Belly-Up Cloud Hosting

• Financial Stability of Cloud Providers
• Stats on Private Company Growth
• Characteristics of Private Companies – Highlights
• The Private Hosting Advantage

Financial Stability of Cloud Providers

This video – “Cloud Hosting Companies Are Dropping Like Flies” — discusses that many cloud hosting companies are shutting down. That makes sense. There has been a tremendous amount of money injected into the cloud hosting industry, which means there have been many startups. When it comes down to it, a startup is a test business, and they haven’t proven themselves capable of maintaining solvency. While you may want to run technological test projects yourself, you never want to serve as a guinea pig in an infrastructure experiment that might put your online presence at risk, especially if you’re hosting mission-critical information, such as that which may require HIPAA cloud hosting.

In the video, we mention that we are a private hosting company. Why should you go with a private company rather than a publicly traded one? Several positive characteristics set successful private companies apart, as discussed by tech writer Bruce Upbin in the 2013 Forbes article “The Six Habits of Successful Private Companies.”

Stats on Private Company Growth

How fast do the largest privately held companies grow? According to figures collected in 2011, says Upbin, the largest private companies grew at 12%, doubling the pace of the S&P 500. KPMG and Forbes released 2013 research revealing that almost 3 in 5 private outfits (58%) were forecast to expand at 6% or above during 12 months. What about the great private companies? Of the 473 private company leaders interviewed, 1 in 10 said sales would accelerate at least 20% over the ensuing year.

Plus, private companies represent the vast majority of businesses. “Forbes … has … been covering non-public companies since its launch in 1917,” says Upbin. “We care about the health of private companies … because we sorta have to. They make up 99% of all businesses in the U.S.”

Characteristics of Private Companies – Highlights

According to Upbin, highlight benefits the most savvy private firms include:

Sense of identity & meaning

There is a vast body of research on the positive impact of meaning on productivity and job satisfaction. For instance, the identity and purpose of privately held Patagonia is sustainability.

Worker loyalty

The SAS Institute, a privately owned software company, based in North Carolina, has grown every year for almost four decades. They succeed by investing in their employees. By bestowing incredible worker benefits – from paternity leave to on-site daycare, from a company swimming pool to free tennis lessons – the company has a 96.7% employee retention rate, way outpacing the tech industry average of 78%.

Yoga-like flexibility

Although 42 of the 220 largest private companies in the U.S. are over 100 years old, they aren’t stuck. Hallmark is a great example, says Upbin: “[The company] started a line of Spanish-language greeting cards in the early 1990s, before Hispanic marketing took off,” he says. “It diversified smartly into cable T.V., embraced the Internet early with e-cards, and introduced some of the first cards with sound chips.”

The Private Hosting Advantage

Do you want to partner with a company that has a sense of mission, high customer satisfaction, and can adapt to meet the ever-changing threat landscape, compliance guidelines, and business expectations? As stated in the above video, many businesses come and go, but Atlantic.Net has the characteristics of a solid and adaptive private cloud hosting company with state-of-the-art cloud server hosting. Atlantic.Net also offers managed, dedicated, and HIPAA compliant hosting solutions.

By Moazzam Adnan