Interviews
Robert Sauchyn,
President/CEO, LFC Hosting.
Contact
Information
Website Address:
http://www.lfchosting.com
Sales
:
E-mail addresses -info@lfchosting.com
Phone number –
1-866-LFC-HOST
Fax Number –
1-306-584-3965
Tech Support
E-mail addresses –
support@lfchosting.com
Phone number -
1-866-LFC-HOST
Fax Number –
1-306-584-3965
General Company Information
E-mail addresses –
info@lfchosting.com
Phone number -
1-866-LFC-HOST
Fax Number –
1-306-584-3965
Written Correspondence
Loose Foot Computing Limited
110-10 Research Drive
Regina, SK S4S 7J7
Canada
Support
Catering
to businesses with extraordinary customer service requirements,
LFC Hosting provides many innovative customer service options,
including unlimited toll-free phone support, LFC's praised and easy to
use tech support trouble ticket system with maximum one day response
time, far superior to the standard e-mail support provided by
competing hosts, and unique live online technical support video
chat to get your problems solved immediately!
Hosting Plans :-
Standard web host plans/services
LFC Hosting
was built with online business in mind and is centered on reliability
and unsurpassed customer service. At only $3.60/domain, LFC's
plans are fully e-commerce ready but are priced like other hosts'
basic plans. Try LFC Hosting first for one month FREE, and
realize your full potential online with access to capabilities
and service unique to LFC that give its valued clients the
advantage over their
competition!
Reseller Plans
LFC Hosting's
reseller package makes reselling web space a breeze with the
ability to manage domain names, e-mail accounts, CGI scripts,
and account settings automatically. LFC also offers aliased
nameservers, separate FTP and FrontPage logins, a fully
customizable control panel and reduced prices on web development
and scripting for your clients, as well as bulk discounts on domains
and POP3 accounts.
E-Commerce Plans
LFC Hosting
was built with online business in mind and is centered on reliability
and unsurpassed customer service. At only $3.60/domain, LFC's
plans are fully e-commerce ready but are priced like other hosts'
basic plans. Try LFC Hosting first for one month FREE, and
realize your full potential online with access to capabilities
and service unique to LFC that give its valued clients the
advantage over their
competition!
Dedicated Server Plans
n/a
Other plans not
mentioned: Colocation
LFC Hosting offers an affordable and
reliable solution for anyone serious about Internet business and
looking for a place to locate their equipment. Our state-of-the-art
climate controlled environment gives you the peace of mind knowing
that uptime, speed, and reliability are guaranteed.
LFC Hosting's
unique approach to co-location sets us apart from the competition,
giving you an easy, affordable, and secure data center.
Setup:
Once we receive your servers, they will most likely be set up and
ready to go that same day.
Support:
We have free basic technical support available for server reboots and
other basic technical issues. Our technical support staff is also
available to assist you with any of your advanced technical
requirements at a charge of $45/hour.
Hardware
crash: In the event a piece
of hardware in your server crashes, you will be notified and
responsible to replace the hardware. Our technical staff is available
to install the new hardware at a cost usually less than $25.00.
Contract
Length: Colocation
contracts can be established on Quarterly, Semi-Annual, and Annual
payment plans.
Internal
Network: Your server will
be connected to our 100 Mbps internal network, this will insure you
receive maximum bandwidth, less bottlenecks, and maximum speed.
External
Network: Your server will
have direct access to our 10 Mbps Fiber Internet connection.
-----------------------------------------------
Who are you
(Give us your name and title)?
Christian Bingham, President, Blastnet Communications Inc.
What make
different your company to several others?
LFC Hosting provides a unique, highly affordable, business-oriented
approach to web hosting. A whole array of non-standard features and
capabilities that competing hosts simply cannot provide, even with
their "e-commerce" level plans, are highly accessible and easy to
implement for businesses of any size, providing you with new
possibilities for doing business online. Our state-of-the-art
connection and servers ensure rapid response times and thus no loss
of visitors to your web site.
Our superior reliability, customer service, network response
times, and the many innovative advanced features and developments go
beyond a standard Internet presence and have made LFC a leader in
the industry. Your business gains a distinct advantage over your
competition by making full use of the many backend capabilities of
the Internet.
Our all-inclusive approach, with many free domain names, POP3
accounts, and essentially everything you will ever need to do
business online, allows you room for expansion; there are no hidden
fees, so you don't pay extra as your site grows. This differs from
the strategies of most other web hosting companies, who 'capture'
clients with a cheap package, then later collect various hidden fees
for extra services and sacrifice support and reliability as another
means of reducing basic package costs.
LFC has been in the business of providing dependable Internet
business solutions since 1996 and now services clients in over 50
countries. Our reliable on-site network was built with business in
mind.
We are simply able to offer a higher quality of service with
many more features, everything you need to conduct secure electronic
commerce, at a lower cost overall than competing services.
How you
describe Web Hosting?
Web Hosting
is the support of the online business activities of companies and
organizations. This includes, but is in no way limited to the housing
of web data. Web Hosting includes making the online front-end and
back-end of a company available to the world 24/7, and everything that
goes along with this, including support for web technologies,
security, and associated systems such as e-mail.
It is a web host’s
responsibility to provide these services at a level capable of fully
supporting the business practices, in their entirety, of its whole
client base. This includes network speed, security, and reliability,
and customer service, that is, immediately addressing the changing
needs of its clients. In other words, a web host’s systems must be
built to fully support the business practices of its largest corporate
client with the attitude that, when the host, or part thereof, goes
down, its clients are unable to operate.
Finally, it is the
responsibility of the web host to continually adapt to the rapidly
evolving technology industry, ensuring that the newest technologies
are immediately available to its clients, and easy for them to
implement, without making it the responsibility of the client to
setup, debug, and even fully understand these technologies, but making
it clear to the client how to use technology to leverage their
existing practices when possible to do so.
In the next 5
years what you see in this industry?
Instead of making predictions
relating to emerging technologies such as WAP or .NET, I would like to
discuss the evolution of web hosting from a business perspective,
which has the ultimate effect on the industry as a whole and on the
consumer.
Web Hosting at
the present time is turning from a highly lucrative industry driven by
thousands of three-month old startups willing to draw blood (or trade
their reputation) for more domain name accounts, to an industry driven
by the needs of business consumers: quality (that is, service level),
dependability, and scalability. This is apparent when going back in
time through the host review archives of “find-a-host sites”, which,
only one year ago, were dominated by horrific reviews of (mainly
anonymous) web hosts.
This trend, not
unique to the hosting industry, is beginning to result in fewer,
larger web hosts governed by customer-driven business morals. These
are the morels of the next-generation web host:
Web Hosting is
the support of the online business activities of companies and
organizations. This includes, but is in no way limited to the housing
of web data. Web Hosting includes making the online front-end and
back-end of a company available to the world 24/7, and everything that
goes along with this, including support for web technologies,
security, and associated systems such as e-mail.
It is a web
host’s responsibility to provide these services at a level capable of
fully supporting the business practices, in their entirety, of its
whole client base. This includes network speed, security, and
reliability, and customer service, that is, immediately addressing the
changing needs of its clients. In other words, a web host’s systems
must be built to fully support the business practices of its largest
corporate client with the attitude that, when the host, or part
thereof, goes down, its clients are unable to operate.
Finally, it is the responsibility of the web host to continually
adapt to the rapidly evolving technology industry, ensuring that the
newest technologies are immediately available to its clients, and
easy for them to implement, without making it the responsibility of
the client to setup, debug, and even fully understand these
technologies, but making it clear to the client how to use
technology to leverage their existing practices when possible to do
so.
We see that
so many Web Hosts providing very cheap Hosting, so this business is
still profitable?
Yes. LFC Hosting has been around
since 1996 and growing steadily since. Rather than providing a
lower cost service, we attribute our longevity to the following
three factors, those which only become increasingly important as the
hosting industry evolves:
a)
Providing a High Quality of Service: At LFC Hosting, we have
always made quality of service our #1 priority, ensuring that our
current customer base is satisfied before attempting to acquire new
customers. It is invariably cheaper to keep a customer than acquire
a new one. Also, through this approach we have maintained a very
good reputation in the industry, which has become our most powerful
marketing tool.
b)
Sticking with our Solid Strategy from Day-One: Very early in
its history, LFC developed a unique business-oriented approach to
web hosting to fill the short-comings of virtually every other web
host at the time. This approach is three-fold.
Firstly, we concentrate on providing
virtually unsurpassed customer service, reliability, and network
response times; having a web host who possesses these three
components is vital for any business to thrive online.
Secondly, we have adopted an
all-inclusive pricing strategy. We include everything that the
typical small business would ever need (5 domain names, full
database and development platform support, etc.) throughout their
growth on the web as standard with all of our business-level plans,
starting at only $18/month. This eliminates the hidden fees that
ultimately make other services more costly for businesses in
addition to the need for a small business to anticipate where they
will be on the web five years down the road in order to choose the
most cost-effective hosting plan.
For us it all evens out for the
simple reason that any given business user will probably use only a
few of the features included with their plan, and different
businesses require features sets. While everything that they don’t
use is free and available for them as they grow, our clients also
gain the confidence that, as new technologies emerge, they will be
made available to them free-of-charge.
Thirdly, we offer very up-front
pricing. For example, our base business plan includes 20 MB of web
space. Although this is plenty for virtually any business website
(our entire 100 page corporate site packed with images is only
approximately 3 MB), most hosts today still advertise ridiculous
numbers such as 500 MB with a $8/month plan, of course, overselling
the space and soaking their customers on additional fees.
This business-oriented approach
continues to make our plans increasingly attractive as the hosting
industry is being remolded. Web hosting consumers are starting to
realize that you get what you pay for, especially when $18/month,
the cost of our all-inclusive business-level plan is still small
change for any business.
c)
Adapting to Change: We have maintained a solid handle on
the market, anticipating change and adapting to it quickly. Our
corporate structure allows for extreme flexibility and speed of
decision making, a requirement for any IT company to last in
today’s marketplace. As the first Canadian host to support WAP
(reported by HostWhois in the fall of 2001) we were also one of
the first hosts to provide inherent support for the .NET
Framework. These features are immediately provided free-of-charge
to all of our existing business customers, giving them the
advantage online.
