Robert Sauchyn, President/CEO, LFC Hosting.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Hosting information
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.