Log onto any of the message boards frequented by adult webmasters. Post a message about adult Web hosting, and while you’ll certainly be inundated with suggestions and endorsements from webmasters and more than a few offers from the hosts themselves, you won’t hear a thing from ISPrime. What you will see, however, is a strong showing of support from ISPrime’s customers, describing their satisfaction with the hosting company’s service.
“We don’t go out to the boards and say ‘come to us, we’re the best,’” says ISPrime’s president, Alexander. “We let the customers speak for us, and let them share their experiences. And by doing so, by leaving it to our satisfied or unsatisfied customers to voice their opinions, we believe we will gain more customers.”
Customer satisfaction is high at ISPrime, probably because the company was built, from the start, from a hosting customer’s point of view. Founded by Alexander and his partners early in the year 2000, ISPrime was the evenual result of their dissatisfaction with the adult hosting available. “We had a few pages that we ran,” he says, “and after a while we found that a lot of hosts were overcharging people, having bad technical support and bad business practices in general.”
To Alexander and his partners, the right move seemed to be starting a host of their own that would offer good prices and technical support, while practicing solid business ethics. “We started a hosting company with one server and one switch,” he says, “and grew to having hundreds of servers now, hosting some of the biggest pay sites out there.”
Those servers are located ISPrime’s data center space, ensuring the very best in physical security, electrical backup, fire suppression and environmental controls. “Our facility runs at between 60 and 65 degrees Fahrenheit all the time,” says Alexander. “A lot of facilities run at 70 degrees, which causes servers to overheat and not perform as well.” Vigilance of this degree is necessary, he says, when operating a business that serves thousands of Web hosting customers. And supporting that many customers means a lot of data transfer. ISPrime has five gigabit Ethernet lines, from different providers. “And we currently use a little bit over one gigabit,” he says, “so at all times, our network can handle five times the capacity.”
The motivation behind ISPrime’s development has had a noticeable impact on its services. With a range of hosting packages including shared, dedicated and colocated plans, one of ISPrime’s greatest strengths is its managed services offering. “We have a lot of experience with managed hosting,” says Alexander. “We’ve been doing it for a lot of years. We offer a complete managed hosting package where all you have to do is give us a domain and we’ll take it from there, including programming, administration, support and any kind of custom hardware or software you need.”
Much of the reason for ISPrime’s complex hosting expertise is its experienced technical team, well versed in programming and Web server development. The high-tech knowledge of the team allows ISPrime to operate with a much tighter performance than other companies might. “We don’t use Apache on our servers,” says Alexander. “We use our own PimpD Web server, which was about a year and a half in development. We tune our servers to do ten times what they can do out of the box. We mostly host high-traffic sites that have one million plus uniques a day, and it’s very important for our clients to have that performance.”
ISPrime’s programming expertise has also allowed it to develop one of the most effective platforms for free hosting in existence. “A lot of the biggest free hosts are actually running our Pimpserver software,” says Alexander, “which took months and months of development to bring it to the state it is in now. It’s perfect, and it’s rated by Akamai as the number one free hosting software out there.”
Probably most important to customers and, as a result, to ISPrime is the company’s pricing. “Bandwidth pricing is a very big issue for adult webmasters,” says Alexander. And in response, ISPrime has developed a range of bandwidth payment plans, along with the lowest of prices. The company has percentile-based bandwidth billing, average-based bandwidth billing and capped bandwidth plans.
The loyalty of ISPrime’s customers is simply a product of good service, in technical support, performance and availability. But more than anything else, what wins them over is ISPrime’s pricing. “Pricing is very important to a lot of people,” says Alexander. “And that’s something we’ve been able to satisfy people with for years.”
