Toronto Startup: Verelo Keeps A Watchful Eye On Your Website INTERVIEW

If you’re a web based startup or small business web uptime is crucial. These days if you’re down for even two minutes, it can cause a world of hurt. A customer can go to your website, see its down and then send that information out to the social web.

If you’re launching a startup it can be worse. Launching a startup is one of the most competitive sports in the world. If you’re down, again only for a short time, new users, competitors and the media can stumble upon a down site and never come back.

There are services out there that can cost hundreds of dollars a month. There are also services out there that are free but will send you spam from every SEO business on the planet. In comes Verelo a service that will monitor and protect your website, providing piece of mind.

We got a chance to talk with one of the co-founders of this Toronto startup. Check out the interview after the break.

What is Verelo?

Verelo Inc. helps SMBs identify sites that are down and infected with malware, and resolves outages faster than ever before. Our website monitoring and malware detection services aim to maintain our clients’ online reputation and provide them the tools to keep their sites safe and online.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Andrew McGrath-CEO
Andrew is a software developer with a DevOps background and a keen business
eye. He exited his first venture, an online learning platform for the mining
industry in Australia, in 2008. From there, Andrew has served roles as Director
of Operations at Syncapse and led large scale website migrations at Hostopia.
He has experienced the pain hosting providers go through and understands the
difficulty of providing a great customer experience with the existing monitoring
tools in today’s market.

Mike Curry-CTO
Mike is our resident mad-hacker with a sense of humour to match. After a couple
stints of senseless hacking, Mike helped build Dcrawl, one of the first distributed
computer systems that index the Internet. From there Mike held roles at a variety
of web-based companies and until meeting Andrew at Hostopia. There he
worked as a Senior Software Engineer and their paths crossed again while on
the Operations team at Syncapse. When he’s not making light of the situation,
you’ll see his face glued to the screen, happily buried in code.

They’re crazy, they’re passionate and they are making the Internet a more
reliable place.

What problem does Verelo solve?

Verelo’s key goal is to make the Internet a better and more reliable place. For
big scale websites like Facebook, Gmail and Linkedin, their dedicated teams are
focused on keeping their infrastructure reliable, and they spend millions to keep
their services online. For the smaller guys, Verelo aims to provide an affordable
service that gives them the key uptime and performance metrics utilized by the
web giants online.

What is your secret sauce?

Verelo is backed by an amazingly solid technical solution. The combination of the
founders’ tech background and hands on experience resulted in creating a great
monitoring implementation. Regardless of if you have 1 or 100,000 sites, Verelo
is designed to suit your needs and provide affordable and actionable data.

Why would someone need Verelo, doesn’t their hosting company help protect their sites?

Most hosting providers keep a close eye on their server uptime as a whole,
but they do not monitor their customers individually. With an industry as
commoditized as web hosting, it’s easy for sites to slip through the cracks. We
provide users access to an enterprise class system to monitor their sites. Be
it malware infections, broken code, or our 911 service, our users get critical
information to minimize and prevent future outages.

What is one lesson you’ve learned in the startup process, launching Verelo?

When you think you have a great idea, you’re probably right, but you’re also
probably thinking too big to start. Pick something small, and scale it based on
customer feedback.

What’s next for Verelo?

Growth and customer feedback. We’re about to launch our 911 service which
allows users to setup an outbound conference call with the intent of resolving
problems faster by helping assemble large teams quickly over the phone. This
will allow our customers to react to problems in a quick and painless manner.
We want to help reduce downtime, so you’ll see a trend in our features moving
towards helping companies keep their site online and recovering quicker.

Linkage:

Check out Verelo at their website here

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