2012 has been another great year at Crucial thanks to all our customers, vendors, and the hard work by the Crucial team. A lot has been happening behind the scenes with some big projects being launched only last week. The biggest changes have set us up as the leader in cloud and web hosting in Australia: new branding (new name: “Crucial Cloud Hosting” and new logo), new user friendly website and support resources, and we are the first provider in the World to deliver an all Solid State Disk storage system that offers guaranteed performance levels to Virtual Server customers.

What does Crucial Stand for?

Crucial has always had a strong commitment to helping our customers, however this year we solidified our company purpose, vision, and values and they will play a key role in the future direction of the business.

Purpose: Crucial exists to help everyone succeed online.
Vision: To make web hosting easy and reliable.
Values: We’re Customer Centric, We’re Accountable, We’re Proactive, and We’re One Team

Achievements Over the Past Year:

We have achieved a huge amount in the past year with a clear focus on our purpose, vision, and values. Here are a few of the major items we achieved this year:

• We moved in to a new office with 3 x the space of our old office, followed by “The Office Party” as a thank you and an opportunity for our customers and our team to meet in person.
• Released new company purpose, vision, and values.
• Released new branding, we are now officially “Crucial Cloud Hosting”.
• Released brand new website which is much more user friendly, easier to use, and uses modern technologies like HTML 5, etc. Improved support experience with a focus on users finding information easily on the site.
• Released new “Virtual Server” which includes vast improvements for customers relating to self-service. Upgraded plans, and improved user experience.
• Released new “Cloud VPS” product which comes based on all SSD SAN storage! This is by far the fastest, and best value Cloud VPS product in the market. No other cloud hosting provider in Australia offers an all SSD Cloud VPS product with guaranteed performance. Give it a spin to see the performance potential with this new product!
• Released new “PAYG Public Cloud” service which provides a huge range of features and tools which simplify running your infrastructure all through an easy to use interface, and all metered hourly – so you only pay for what you use! Spin up 20 VMs for 1 day, only pay for the 1 day you use them. Use some cool features like auto-scaling of your VM’s to ensure your website can handle the traffic and load spikes.
• All new Shared & Reseller plans are all now deployed on all SSD SAN storage!  No other web hosting company in Australia are offering their plans on all SSD storage, let alone an all SSD SAN!  Expect to see additional performance on an already high performing product.
• Improved control.crucial.com.au extensively to give you more control, a simplified interfacre to manage all your services, and reduced the logins required to other systems.
• Huge improvements on the customer service front. We have always set the bar with service levels and we continue to work to improve them. Here are some of the outcomes of the changes we have made:
  • 9/10 customers would recommend us to a friend or business colleague.
  • 94% of customers are satisfied or extremely satisfied with our support levels (measured through our quarterly customer surveys)
• We achieved an average uptime of all our services of 99.97% over the entire 2012 year.
• Thanks to the support of our customers and staff we were received the following awards:
  • Sydney Business Awards Finalist
  • Ranked #42 in Smart50’s fastest growing companies in Australia
  • Ranked #20 in CRN’s Fast50 fastest growing IT resellers in Australia
• Implemented a strong focus on blogging to help customers and others in the industry by delivering a huge amount of regular content. Link: Crucial Cloud Hosting Blog
• Implemented rigorous internal training programs to improve knowledge internally, both cross-team, as well as within teams.
• Implemented an training policy so Crucial can fund further education for our staff.
• Improved network redundancy and throughput, now with 6 x 1Gbit links in total (2 x 1Gbit to Vocus, 2 x 1Gbit to NTT, and 2 x 1Gbit to Equinix Peering)
• Implemented per ticket rating system which allows every ticket to be rated. We’ve seen great improvements in support as a result, and continue to see changes month on month.

What’s in Store for Next Year?

We’ll be carrying our momentum through 2013, with the following items being a portion of what’s planned for next year:

• Brand new order & upgrade form, simplifying the way the order form works and making it user friendly.
• Continued improvements on our Cloud VPS, PAYG Public Cloud, and Virtual Server platforms. Including new and improved features, further automation, etc.
• Addition of value add products & services (such as CloudFlare, Server Monitoring plans).
• Continued improvements of our customer service through a number of internal initiatives.
• Improved Management plans for our Virtual Server, Cloud VPS, and PAYG products.
• Migration of Legacy Cloud VPS customers to new Cloud VPS product (including being upgraded to an all SSD SAN, so some huge performance benefits on an already high performing product!).
• Migration of Legacy VPS/Virtual Server customers to new Virtual Server product.
• Migration of HA Shared & Reseller to our new Cloud Platform using all SSD SAN storage.
• Investigating addition of a global CDN service with over 109 locations available globally!
• Automation of cPanel licensing, Shared/Reseller account setups, and R1Soft installations.
• DNS control panel for Virtual Server and Cloud Products.

We continue to evolve the business through the feedback that we get from our customers and would like to say thank you one last time for your support throughout 2012 – we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you!

The whole Crucial team wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

– Aaron Weller
Managing Director