Professionalism First: Germany’s SIM-Networks Delivers Virtual, Cloud, and Dedicated Server Hosting Solutions with a Customer-Centric Touch

TL; DR: SIM-Networks is a brand of Netversor GmbH, a Germany-based IT solutions holding. The company provides virtual, cloud, and dedicated server hosting solutions backed by an international team devoted to putting customers first. The company leverages more than a decade of experience to deliver enterprise-grade technology, an ironclad service level agreement (SLA), and a continuous innovation cycle. Moving forward, the company will continue to evolve in step with industry demand with the introduction of flexible private and hybrid cloud solutions.

It’s no secret that the global hosting market is teeming with competition from the nearly 340,000 service providers looking for a seat at the table.

The industry’s $32 billion market share — projected to reach $76.2 billion by 2023 — creates the illusion that every player will get their piece of the pie. In reality, the seemingly insatiable appetites of industry giants like GoDaddy, Amazon Web Service, and Google Cloud leave other companies struggling to receive their fair share.

But Sergey Dolgushev, CEO at SIM-Networks, has discovered a recipe for success for standing out among the crowd: Quality infrastructure mixed with an unwavering devotion to proficiency and innovation.

Sergey Dolgushev, CEO, gave us the scoop on SIM-Networks and the company’s customer-first approach.

“A professional approach is the basis of SIM-Networks,” he said. “We, Germans, don’t like dilettantism or sophomoric attitudes. That’s the reason we hire high-qualified professionals. That’s the reason that our tech support is able to solve customers’ issues at any time. They are the masters of all infrastructural nuances.”

SIM-Networks, launched in 2009, operates under parent company Netversor GmbH, a German provider of IT systems and infrastructure solutions for B2B customers worldwide that was founded in 2006. Today, SIM-Networks leverages its history and expertise to provide customers with a wide range of virtual, cloud, and dedicated server hosting solutions via certified datacenters in Karlsruhe, widely regarded as the IT capital of Germany.

According to Sergey, customers can keep an eye out for innovations in private and hybrid cloud offerings in the future. In the meantime, the forward-thinking company will continue to back its enterprise-grade technology and innovative thinking with a strictly professional business approach.

13 Years of Experience Evolving in Step with Global Industry Demand

When Netversor GmbH initially launched in 2006, Sergey told us the company focused on IT consulting and web development for the German B2B market under the brand SIM-Computers.

“It was an exciting time for young, enthusiastic IT engineers in Europe,” he said. “Amazon had just released its first public cloud in 2006, but no one knew exactly what cloud technology was or could predict that in just 10 years, the global IT landscape would change drastically.”

After recognizing a gap in the German market, the company added system integration, hosting, and hardware-based infrastructure solutions to its product menu, becoming SIM-Networks. The company rented space in its first TelemaxX datacenter. Soon, SIM-Networks engineers featured a fiber optic backbone network of high-bandwidth channels connecting to the company’s infrastructure to leading European internet providers.

The company serves customers in almost 100 countries across the globe.

Later, SIM-Networks rented space in an additional Tier-III+ TelemaxX datacenter. The company offered dedicated servers, VDS, web hosting, and colocation services at both of TelemaxX DCs for six years. Then, in 2015, it built a cloud solutions’ development.

“Our IT hardware infrastructure expertise had grown, so we decided to move into cloud technology,” he said. “In 2015, we started the development of our Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution based on the OpenStack platform.”

SIM-Networks first released SIM-Cloud IaaS 1.0 in early 2016, and it quickly became the company’s flagship product (the latest edition, SIM-Cloud 5.0, will be released shortly). By the end of the 2000s, Sergey said SIM-Networks began to explore various markets across Europe, looking beyond EU countries.

You can learn more about some of our implemented projects by reading Case Studies and Our Customers’ Stories on the corporate website.

“We saw that Russian, Ukrainian, and some ex-USSR countries’ IT markets were poor in terms of quality and reliability,” he said. “There were a lot of ‘stealth’ hosting providers with equipment of dubious quality, frequent downtime, and many other troubles that we could remedy with our expertise and enterprise-class equipment.”

Today, SIM-Networks serves customers on five continents in almost 100 countries.

High-Quality Tech, an Ironclad SLA, and a Forward-Thinking Approach

Through the years, Sergey said the SIM-Networks team witnessed the hosting market evolve in sync with customer needs. “We saw how its strategic concept had been changed from local, on-premise servers, to remote colocation, then to datacenter locations, and then to the cloud,” he said.

The rapid change forced the company to determine its competitive strengths, which Sergey said begin first with high-quality technology suitable for businesses of any size, from SMBs to enterprises. “Our equipment is hosted at large professional Tier-III and Tier-III+ datacenters, certified by European standards ISO/IEC 27001 for additional data and equipment safety,” he said. “For many of our customers, this provides critical value.”

Secondly, the international company delivers personalized services to every client and project backed by multilingual, around-the-clock support — yes, even on a Sunday at 3 a.m. The SIM-Networks SLA guarantees a response to all support requests within one hour, though representatives often respond to chat requests within just one minute.

“We hear from clients who have come to us from previous hosting providers that some of the hosts just disappear when problems are detected,” Sergey said. “But corporate values at SIM-Networks mandate high-level soft skills for our team. We are focused on our clients and build our solutions to satisfy their expectations completely.”

One of the essential points to satisfy customers’ demands of excellent service, Sergey believes, is a strategic full-cycle approach. This means that the lifecycle of the project — from architecture, design, equipment purchasing, to installation the configuration, customization, and servicing the customer’s infrastructure in data centers — is performed by the company employees with no outstaffing or outsourcing at all.

In addition to enterprise-grade tech and a generous SLA, SIM-Networks operates with a focus on continuous innovation. For example, Sergey said the company is keeping a close eye on emerging trends in multicloud architecture and containerization. “We explore both of them — likely, the next step of our evolution will be in one of those directions,” he said.

An International Team Maintaining the Highest Levels of Professionalism

While SIM-Networks and Netversor GmbH are headquartered in Germany, the company also has an office in Kyiv, Ukraine, and employees across the globe. Sergey said the team is made up of talented, competent, and productive employees who are inspired by the company’s overall mission and corporate values. The company strives to foster a stable working environment that encourages continuous growth.

“We work hand in glove with each other regardless of geographical location, age, gender, and so on,” he said. “There is one criterion to become a part of our team — to be competent, honest, and self-motivated.”

Part of the company’s focus on professionalism includes a commitment to staffing employees 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year, without ever relying on outsourced customer service. The SIM-Networks SLA guarantees the company will take financial responsibility for poor service, so there’s no room to take any chances in terms of staffing.

SIM-Networks is run by a friendly staff of committed, talented employees.

Sergey said SIM-Networks places its full trust in its internal employees. “All of my employees, including B2B sales managers, the marketing department, the HR department, the customer care department, the accounting manager, project managers, the technical staff, are all evangelists of SIM-Networks,” he said.

In terms of corporate social responsibility, SIM-Networks focuses its charitable efforts on social programs, educational projects, and nonprofit organizations that work toward a clean planet, foster a society built on mutual respect, and help enhance the cultural values of civilization.

On the Horizon: Innovations in Private and Hybrid Cloud

The continuous internal development process at SIM-Networks is based mainly on the routine collection of customer feedback, as well as adapting to emerging industry trends and innovations. For example, after the first release of SIM-Cloud, Sergey said the company received questions from users regarding backup tools.

After thoroughly researching the topic, the company’s infrastructure engineers designed SIM-Cloud BaaS, a Backup-as-a-Service solution for copying data to the cloud. Users have two options in terms of data storage — the datacenter in which their cloud infrastructure is deployed or another Tier-III+ datacenter in a remote location.

“With the first option, BaaS Local, the user gets a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 300GB to 600GB per hour and faster data recovery; with the second, BaaS Remote, the user gets RTO of up to 150GB per hour and enhanced security,” Sergey said.

In addition to new products, the company continually upgrades its infrastructure when needed to ensure clients enjoy the most up-to-the-date, secure, and hassle-free solutions. Moving forward, Sergey said SIM-Networks will continue to do what it does best: innovate.

“We plan to pay more attention to build private and hybrid cloud solutions — those are the products many customers are interested in,” he said. “We will also continue enlarging our Anything-as-a-Service (XaaS) portfolio, creating new products, and intensively updating our corporate websites.”

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