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C I Host Celebrates Nine Year Mark
By Justin Lee, theWHIR.com
May 4, 20006 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- In a highly competitive Web hosting market in which start-ups rise and fall on a weekly basis, achieving exceptional customer service often takes a back seat to offering the lowest price point.
This is part of why C I Host (cihost.com) takes pride in celebrating nine years of continued growth and expansion as a Web hosting provider.
In just under a decade, the Dallas, Texas-based Web host has built a client base of more than 250,000 customers in 182 countries, maintained a healthy financial status and continues to offer a diverse range of value-added products and services.
C I Host CEO Christopher Faulkner attributes this success primarily to the company's ability to maintain its financial independence.
"If you look at what we've accomplished, we've done so without any investors, bank lines or credits - it's all paid for in cash, so our company is 100 percent organically grown," says Faulkner. "Everything was bought and paid for in cash and is wholly-owned and controlled by C I Host.
In addition to its wholly-owned data centers in Dallas, Los Angeles, Chicago and Newark, C I Host has also invested in a robust and redundant network, which is one of the largest privately owned fiber-optic cable networks in the world.
Coupled with its four data centers, the network enables C I Host to provide customers with geographic load balancing.
C I Host hopes to extend its reach into Europe later this year when it opens its first London facility.
"We kind of waited just a little bit because we opened up our New Jersey facility," says Faulkner. "London is set to open towards the end of this year, followed by the announcement of partnerships with some Chinese operators to sell our services in China under our brand or private label."
In addition to achieving financial independence, C I Host also insists on maintaining full control over all sectors of its business, particularly customer support. The Web host chooses not to outsource its technical support to other companies.
"We maintain a 24-hour operation, and maintain all of that here in Dallas, Texas so we can control the service level as needed," says Faulkner. "I don't believe in outsourcing the most important function of the company to somebody in India who is 6,000 miles away."
Over the past year, C I Host has developed a number of new products including an anti-scam toolbar and other strategies to protect Internet users from Internet crime, and launched a Web-based technology to help musicians promote their music, as well as help nonprofit arts organizations to raise funds to help out victims of national disasters.
The company's imaginative, and sometimes outrageous, marketing campaigns have caught the attention of international media and prospective customers.
Its publicity stunts have included placing the C I Host logo on former-heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield's boxing trunks, sending a contest winner to the edge of space in a jet, and creating the first "human billboard" by tattooing its logo on the back of a man's head.
The unorthodox approach seems to be working, having brought the company plenty of new customers. In the first six months of the first human billboard campaign, some 500 new customers signed up with C I Host.
And despite its continued success, Faulkner says C I Host has no plans on going public anytime soon.
"Would we have grown faster if we had $40 million in funding?" says Faulkner. "Probably so. But would we have made as smart business decisions along the way? Probably not, because when it's other people's money, it's very easy to make some slaphappy, quick decisions. I think it's been a good thing for us."
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
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