The Virginia-based voice and data communications carrier says it intends to market the re-launched Concentric brand under the banner of "business class shared hosting at affordable prices," offering plans with generous allocations of email, traffic and disk space for as low as $7.95 per month.

"What we are doing is coming out with very competitive plans in terms of pricing and allocation ... with a value proposition that says we're business class hosting," Barbara Branaman, newly appointed vice president and general manager for the hosting unit at XO Communications, told the Web Host Industry Review. "It's a good way for us to take advantage of this particular market segment which isn't one XO traditionally sells in."

The return of Concentric leaves XO's shared hosting unit to market itself under the established brand, while the company's higher-end hosting services, which include dedicated servers, managed hosting and colocation services, remain under the XO handle. Concentric, which intends to focus on the small businesses market, will continue to have the full weight of XO's financial backing, Branaman said in a release.

Concentric hosts over 200,000 domains on both Unix and Windows platforms. For the last four years, XO has integrated its shared hosting services with its Internet access offerings, which include DSL, dedicated Internet access, and its XOption local and long distance voice bundles. "We've focused on bundling our shared hosting with access products," says Branaman. Since the 2000 merger, the company has also begun offering a private label version of its shared hosting through Microsoft's bCentral, a portal that provides Web-based business tools and applications for millions of businesses.

XO decided to rehabilitate the Concentric brand, first established back in 1997, because of the opportunities presented by an extremely fragmented market, says Branaman. She explains that in the last few years, the market has been marked by significant price compression along with entries from newcomers such as Yahoo!, making it a perfect time for Concentric to jump in.

Leveraging the Concentric brand is just one way the company believes it can exploit this opportunity. After four years, says Branaman, the Concentric brand is still a known entity. "We believe we still have some brand equity out there even though it has been a while."

Beyond the brand, Concentric is hedging its bets on the high-level performance and reliability of its internally developed Web hosting architecture. The platform not only performs well, but is extremely secure, built by an engineering team that literally "borders on the paranoid in terms of security," says Branaman. And she proudly adds that Concentric has never experienced a compromise of its data or that of its customers.

In conjunction with Monday's announcement, the company revealed that it recently secured a patent for its hosting platform, the only one of its kind in the industry. The patent, which took five years to obtain, is rock-solid proof of the platform's viability. "It proves that we were early to the market with really leading edge technology that provides the kind of security, reliability, availability and scalability to customers that they are not going to get anywhere else," says Branaman.

The platform's technology, enhanced continually over the years, gives Concentric a number of advantages that it says will help it excel in today's disjointed market. Firstly, it creates a significant cost advantage. And second, because the platform is so mature, Concentric is able to offer hosting with more features, tools and top-notch customer care. "I do believe we have an advantage over our competition, in terms of our technology and our cost structure," says Branaman.

She believes Concentric's platform gives it a leg up on major players like Verio (verio.com) and Interland (interland.com), which have been built largely through acquisition and merger, forcing them to face the dilemma of integrating several different hosting platforms and off-the-shelf technologies.

"We recognized the need to design from the ground up, because it is much easier to design well and then grow from there and enhance, than it is to do it after the fact and go in and try to impose security, try to impose reliability and availability on existing architectures," says Branaman.

For its part, Concentric has been able to avoid such predicaments. While it did make a few acquisitions in its early days, "most of our growth has been organic," says Branaman.

Concentric is backing up its claims with a 99.9 percent service level agreement and 90-day money-back guarantee. In addition, Concentric has introduced a newly developed Web site builder, added enhanced junk mail and spam filtering capabilities with its offerings and boasts a very high first call resolution rate for support requests.

Finally, another advantage of reviving Concentric, says XO spokesperson Jenna Dee, is the operational independence that will help the company get closer to its customers, enabling it to better understand their Web hosting needs.