Host Interview - LFC Hosting
Loose Foot Computing Limite
Tell us about your company and services:
Loose Foot Computing Limited (LFC) has been creating and hosting professional web sites since 1996. The LFC Hosting brand and its unique, business-oriented model was launched in 1998 and has been growing rapidly since due to its all-inclusive, customer driven approach to web hosting.
LFC specializes in the technical support of online business activities, rather than bulk web hosting. LFC Hosting provides innovative global electronic commerce solutions, excelling in speed, reliability, technical support, and in providing the advanced capabilities of the Internet to business of any size.
LFC currently hosts thousands of web sites for clients in over 50 countries
and has doubled in size in the last six months, ranked the third fastest growing
company in the province in Feb., 2002 and the fourth in Feb., 2003.
What are your target markets?
Although LFC hosts many large corporations in our data center, we has always
catered to the average small business with the need to develop to an Internet
presence and sell their products and services online with limited capital. Our
primary sector of service is the website and software development industry;
however, LFC provides service to small business in every major business sector.
What makes you different from other web hosting companies?
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.
What would you say is your company's main strength?
Most hosts today concentrate on providing the most web space for the lowest price, even when the average website is still only 2 MB, while providing unsatisfactory customer service, reliability, and support for back-end (hidden) capabilities, resulting in an endless string of hidden fees with hosting plans that may appear very attractive on the surface.
At LFC Hosting, we focus on providing many more valuable features - features
that are typically available only to large companies, at a very affordable cost,
making them accessible to businesses of any size through our innovative business
and network design. It is these capabilities, together with our all-inclusive
approach to hosting, superior customer service (rated #1 by various industry
rating sites), reliability, and network response times, that give your business
the distinct online advantage over your competition in hosting with LFC.
In your opinion, what make great hosting services?
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.
Describe the support services that you provide:
LFC Hosting has taken customer and technical support to a level far beyond that of any other web host. LFC Hosting has set a support standard in the industry, a standard which has yet to be met by any other host. The future of any online company strongly relies on the efficiency of its web site, and its web host. If a company is unable to prevent potential problems, and immediately rectify those problems which do occur, it will ultimately suffer. This is why we have dedicated so many resources to ensure that our clients' support needs are exceeded.
Aside from constantly staffing extremely skilled and helpful technicians, we offer a variety of methods of technical support to all of our clients:
The LFC Live Support Chat
The LFC Hosting Chat Center is a live Internet-based (IRC) chat room staffed by our technical support representatives. Our clients find that it is often easier to relay a problem to us if they are able to cut and paste the error they are receiving into a live chat room and get an immediate response.
Trouble Ticket System
Sending email after email to the support department of any traditional web host can prove to be very time consuming and aggravating. LFC Hosting has taken e-mail support to the next level offering a completely centralized trouble ticket system. Instead of sending our support department an email, clients simply post their issues as a trouble ticket. The support representative most qualified to answer their question responds with either a solution or clarification.
Not only does this allow all LFC Hosting support representatives to contribute
to the solution of the problem, it also centralizes all issues, allowing our
clients to look back on a trouble ticket even after the issue has been closed.
Where do you see the hosting industry 4-5 years from now?
Rather than 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.
Thank you
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