We caught up with
Nishant Kaushal, Managing Director of Nish Knowledge Factory Instantiated, the company behind SmokyHosts, 0frills, and OSLogs. In the latest edition of
Website Planet interviews, Nishant shares how his early passion for hosting evolved into a multi-brand operation spanning three continents, with a focus on affordability, transparency, and technical excellence. Continue reading to learn more.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your company, SmokyHosts?
I am Nishant Kaushal, the Managing Director of Nish Knowledge Factory Instantiated (OPC) Private Limited (
nkfinstantiated.com), a legally registered company in India that owns and runs the brands
SmokyHosts.com,
0frills.com, and
OSLogs.com.
Around 2004, when I was still completing my university studies (AWS was still not born), is when I wished to make a website for my School, where I studied all 12 years of schooling. However, without any pocket money and a lack of free hosting companies around, but with knowledge of programming and Linux server administration, I couldn’t find a good enough webhosting service that would offer me basic hosting with just PHP and MySQL support, where I could code and host my school’s website.
That was also the time when the awareness of online advertising grew, and I knew that there was an opportunity there. I borrowed some money from my grandmom, picked up a cPanel/WHM-based reseller webhosting, and started SmokyHosts as a place that would offer free webhosting services, with cPanel access, PHP, and MySQL support, in exchange for participating in SmokyHosts forums (
smokyhosts.com/forums). And it grew like crazy! People would discuss anything amongst the 10s of topics on the forums, driving traffic to SmokyHosts.com website, AdSense would help me make money to cover the cost of the reseller webhosting account I had, and in exchange, I would offer the forum members free webhosting services.
As I completed university and got hands-on knowledge of how the webhosting industry works, I started offering paid cPanel webhosting services for those who needed more resources than what was available as part of the free webhosting and were willing to upgrade.
Then, it was around 2008, when the buzz around cloud hosting started catching up, and I knew, while I could not compete with the hyperscaler Cloud Service Providers like AWS, GCP, or Azure, I could start offering Virtual Private Servers (VPS). And that is what I did – I used the OpenVZ technology, the most popular technology of that time, to create VPS. KVM came much later!
What different kinds of hosting services do you provide?
Today, due to the ever-increasing cost of cPanel, we had to shut down free hosting, after running it for a good 20 years (I bet nobody would have run cPanel-based free webhosting for that long in the industry), but we do offer shared cPanel webhosting, cPanel/WHM-based reseller webhosting, VPS, cloud VPS reseller hosting, and storage VPS, along with domain registration services.
Our services are now spread across 3 continents (USA, Europe, and Asia), to cater to different customer requirements, based upon latency and local governance of where customer data should reside.
What benefits do you offer that might set you apart from your competitors? Why should a potential client choose SmokyHosts?
SmokyHosts started ground up with every staff member having hands-on skills to run a webhosting business, manage a webserver, and support our customers. This confidence from the leadership team of your web host would give the customers the much-needed trust that their data is in the right hands.
To top it up, unlike many other budget hosts who charge extra for backups, we take regular remote backups of all our customer data, absolutely free of cost. So you know that any hardware failure would never lead to data loss.
What can you tell me about the work you’re doing through 0frills?
This was way back in 2023, when the owners of cPanel announced their usual yearly price increase, and the industry started moving away from cPanel. However, we wanted to give our customers a choice. They could stay with cPanel and pay the premium, or choose to host with our subsidiary company 0frills.com, which primarily uses Directadmin control panel, which would allow us to keep the budget-friendly offers for our budget-sensitive customers. This is how 0frills.com began in 2023.
The USP of 0frills is that, once you are hosted at 0frills, you will never need any other webhost. At 0frills, while we offer unlimited every other resource, we also ensure that your storage allocation grows as your needs grow. We add 1GB of free storage to the customer’s storage limits each month, so they are never out of storage!
And there will always be only one plan. The 0Plan. So, absolutely anybody can come and host, no matter their technical background, without having to choose among tens of hosting deals. It’s just one deal for all your webhosting needs!
What are some emerging trends in hosting, and how do you ensure that you stay ahead of the curve in the competitive field you’re in?
While our target audience has been personal website customers or Medium, Small, and Micro enterprise (MSME) customers, we ensure that we always cater to their requirements, within their budget. We offer customized deals for those who need. Nowadays, with our target audience wishing to come back to traditional webhosting services, from using Native Cloud services, due to the expenses involved, we know that we are here to run a sustainable business and stay relevant to our customers’ needs.
To create some excitement, we will soon be launching storage boxes, which will bring down the cost of your storage to less than what even Google/Gmail offers!
How and when did OSLogs start? How does it fit into the domain of webhosting service offerings?
Most (almost all) of the web hosting industry uses different flavors of Operating Systems, and it is always necessary to be up to date. In order to have support and security updates, there is no one single place that lists the latest version of all the Operating Systems used, along with up-to-date details of what’s new and upcoming in the new version of the Operating Systems you are using. This was the driver behind starting OSLogs.com, a place where we log all the updates of Operating Systems!
At OSLogs, you can get updates of all the latest Operating system releases, new features in them, pre-release announcements, as well as some technical articles that will help you on a day-to-day basis for managing your servers.
We will soon be posting live updates from the venues where the new Operating System release announcements will be happening, so you will be the first to catch up on the new and upcoming features!
