Pugmarks vs IDC
Pugmarks offers distinct advantages to the customers over and above to what an IDC can directly offer to the clients. The issue assumes immense importance in light of the fact that an alarming number of IDCs have mushroomed in the past few years. All the IDCs speak of the same 'state-of-art' infrastructure hence; one seems no different from the other. However, when the client needs any micro level services or day-to-day support on the servers, most IDC's do not have the staff or expertise to offer the same.

This is where the role of companies like Pugmarks assumes importance. Pugmarks provides customized services and individual attention to all the customers which in turn adds value to the hosting domain. The customers can use any IDC's, out of the available ones which provide network infrastructure support. The customer not only craves for the support but also complete satisfaction which can be accomplished once the hosting is initiated and actually experienced, at least in some measure with the oft-repeated cliché of customer being the 'King'. The required amount of space in the IDCs can be bought 'off-the-shelf' but this assumes little importance until customer satisfaction is accomplished. Certain issues, which will further reinforce Pugmarks claim is that customers will get better service through Pugmarks than directly from an IDC:

Business models
The basic difference in the services of an IDC and Pugmarks starts when their business model is compared. IDC's business comprises, creating and managing ideal hosting environment by creating and selling space and bandwidth. They endorse network and physical security, network availability, monitoring, bandwidth, peering, power and air-conditioning thousands of square feet of premium space at strategic locations. Some IDC's also offer value added services like data storage, load balancing etc. Pugmarks on the other hand out sources the required hosting infrastructure and focuses on micro-level support. It provides individual and customized support to the customer and focuses on ensuring that the client's server is working at peak level all the time. IDC's are like builders of cities and urban infrastructure (roads, sewerage etc.) whereas Pugmarks builds homes (house, interiors etc.). While a city infrastructure is a pre-requisite to build a home, a client needs to contact a 'home builder' and not a 'city builder'.

Individual attention
IDCs generally operate on rack and cage level business. World class IDC's will typically have between 200-600 racks (approx. 10 servers per rack) per location when fully functional. Thus a customer's server is amongst thousands of other servers and it is easy to imagine the priority and attention that a client can expect from an IDC to get a micro level task carried out. On the other hand, Pugmarks by focusing on server level business prioritizes the needs of the customers and gives individual attention to the client.

Focus
For an IDC, the data-center itself is the focus of attention and therefore the stress will be on the overall Network management than the individual server. Incase of Pugmarks, focus is the individual server performance since the network management is taken care of, by the IDC itself. Pugmarks therefore directs all its energy to monitor the individual server performance. IDCs fire-fight to keep the data center up and running whereas Pugmarks fire-fights to keep servers up and running.

Trained Manpower
IDCs have manpower trained in Networking, Bandwidth management, Peering, Rack cabling power and facilities management etc. Pugmarks, on the other hand, has manpower with skill sets that include server management, database management, application management, DNS, traffic monitoring, console level support and remote server management.

Managed Services Support
24x7 support promised by IDCs is for network uptime and not individual server support since it will not be practically feasible for the IDC to have enough manpower for both network management and server level services/maintenance support. This distinct advantage of 24x7 maintenance support can only be provided by Pugmarks which has trained server administrators ready to swing into action as soon as the clients demand.

Support Location
IDCs provide support from a single location only whereas Pugmarks can provide support from multiple locations (From India as well as from its U.S office in Chicago)

Experience
IDCs have experience in Networking and data center management whereas Pugmarks has experience of more than 5 years in Server, Web site, e-mail and application management.

Cost Advantage
Pugmarks provides hosting services to several high traffic customers by virtue of which it acts like a resource aggregator. As a result, Pugmarks gets preferential pricing and bulk discounts for bandwidth and rack-space, which an IDC may not be able to offer to an end user directly.

Application level expertise
Pugmarks has technically competent manpower, which is comfortable working on a whole range of technologies at the application level. Therefore when a client comes to Pugmarks, it is not only assured of server administration support but also application level support which may be needed in fire-fighting situations at the server level.

Global Services
Pugmarks can offer global services like Content delivery, Caching, Load balancing, Mirroring etc by evaluating different players in the field and then choosing the optimum solution. IDCs on the other hand are restricted to their own capabilities and cannot offer services beyond their conveniences.

Small vs Big
IDCs consists the whole range of clients, from those having a few servers to those with cages, Fortune 500 companies, ISP's etc. The clients with greater number of racks and cages would be able to generate better service levels and higher priorities. Hence, when a client with few servers comes through Pugmarks, it is assured of high service levels because for the IDC, Pugmarks is a big client. Therefore Pugmarks can leverage its position to extract high service levels for the smaller client as well.