Young tech talent

By PRASANNA RAMAN

Computimes, New Straits Times, 10 January 2002

WARREN Tan fits the general description of a computer whiz, being a member of the Malaysian Mensa Society, having scored eight As in his SPM examinations and currently managing his own Web hosting company.

But perhaps different from the typical techie, the 21-year-old chief executive officer and president of Nerraw.com Sdn Bhd is tall, well-mannered and good-looking.

Tan started building Web sites at the age of 14 and was involved in the online business as he was buying and re-selling computer hardware to friends.

“As I was still a teenager and couldn’t afford to buy PCs back then, I had to buy used items to assemble my own PC and add-on features to enhance its capabilities. Then, I started buying some hardware to re-sell them to my friends who were looking for such parts. That was my first taste of the online business and I became a sort of a second-hand dealer for PC parts,” he recalls.

As his interest in designing Web sites grew, Tan started developing sites for his friends and even helped them host it on a shared server he and some friends had leased. When word got around that Tan could develop Web sites, friends of his friends too wanted to have their own sites built and hosted.

Soon, the number of sites being hosted on their server was reaching the maximum and Tan and his friends were thinking of leasing a second server to handle the increasing volume.

“It was then the idea came about, that we should turn this into a business and no longer just something we were doing for play,” Tan says, adding that the establishment of the business in May 2000 came as a natural evolution of their existing project.

Web hosting issues. The stumbling block among organisations, especially smaller ones, in getting their business online or just having a Web site is their lack of awareness, according to Tan.

“Most of them would like to take their business online but simply do not know how to do it,” he says, explaining that Nerraw.net plays a one-stop shop in helping them take their business online.

“It was initially easy for us to help our clients out as many were technically inclined and knew what they wanted to do, but when we started focusing on smaller companies, we had to approach them differently. We had more explaining to do and that meant providing good customer service.”
Customers today look for the best pricing and best support and using that as their main selling point, Tan says, has helped them grow the company over the last year.

With a tagline that says Unbeatable Prices, Fanatical Support and Guaranteed, the company offers 24-hour, seven-day service. “We never rest. We attend to any query or problem within a two-hour response time,” Tan says. “I always tell my clients that our site also sits on the same server as theirs. So they can be rest assured that we’ll be working to solve the problems because we won’t have access to our e-mails as well.”
Besides being price-sensitive, promising 99.9 per cent of up-time per month is another one of the company’s guarantees to its clients.

“Many local hosting companies don’t dare to give such a guarantee because they operate on a local data centre. We give this guarantee as our international servers are very reliable,” Tan explains.

Smaller companies with limited finances are under the impression that Web hosting is an expensive project to embark on.

“I believe the only part that’s considered expensive is the development of the Website itself, which can cost up to RM1,000. As for Web hosting, we sell our package for just RM99 a year with a 5MB of space and e-mail,” Tan says.

In addition to Web hosting, the company also undertakes domain name registration.

“In the late 1990s, domain name registration for network solutions used to cost about US$70 (about RM266) for two years. We offer it for only RM60 per year, and even give discounts if one wants to register for a longer period of time,” Tan says.

The total cost for domain name registration and Web hosting comes up to RM160 per year, which equals to about 50 sen each day. Therefore, Tan says, just about anybody can afford to have an online presence.
Future of Web hosting. Companies which are into the business of shared hosting can expect to see a growth in their business, albeit a slow one.
Tan says companies that were hosting big portals suffered losses due to the closing down of the portals.

“As our clients are mainly small companies, we were not much affected with the dotcom crash that happened throughout the last year,” he says.
According to Tan, even with the adverse publicity regarding the dotcoms, the future of the Internet is still very promising. “The Internet is the way of the future and it will change a lot more things to come,” he says.