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Robert Sauchyn, LFC President and CEO possess a deep and extremely diverse technology background, with over 13 years industry experience. Prior to founding LFC in 1996, Sauchyn operated as a consultant developing web-based applications to intelligently report the activity of e-commerce website visitors to global clients, innovative technology at the time. Having seen the Internet evolve and experiencing many successes along the way, Sauchyn's creativity, passion and wide range of practical expertise are his most valuable assets in his responsibilities at LFC - growth, marketing, advertising, adaptation, and product development. |
FindBestWebHosting.com:
Hello Robert, we thank you for being with us today and we are glad to have you as our guest at findbestwebhosting.com.
We see that LFC was established in 1996. To get this interview started, can you please give us a brief introduction to LFC Hosting and its history?
Over fifteen years ago, the Internet was just beginning to be the business tool that it is today, connecting buyers and sellers from across the globe and delivering market-critical information with the click of a button. In 1996, I started LFC as a small web development shop with a handful of clients around the global. Then, in 1999, Andrew MacCorquodale, Vice-President, and the founder of the successful Rapid World Computer Solutions, merged forces with LFC and doubled the capacity of the team. Together we created a menu of services which catered to individual budgets and technical needs, resulting in a market differentiation that allowed the company to grow.
LFC Hosting is headquartered located in Regina, Saskatchewan, but has a sphere of operation that extends globally with over 11,000 websites calling our data centre home. We have earned an international reputation for world-class hosting services, and believe that we can be an effective partner in the implementation of a secure, reliable and high performance environment in which to house and meet the technical maintenance requirements of any customer.
In 2000 we made our first major expansion and the company became the first tenant of the Terrace building at the Regina Research Park in Western Canada, and has since expanded its physical space to allow increased capacity for the steadily growing data centre. Further expansion saw the addition of 25 employees who were enlisted for the on-call support desk to fulfill LFC's guaranteed 24/7 technical support.
FindBestWebHosting.com:
What types of hosting service does LFC Hosting offer? Also, please brief us on LFC Hosting plans
Currently we offer Shared Hosting, Windows Hosting, Reseller Hosting and Co-Location with packages that meet the needs of any small business at a price they can afford. Hosting packages include our Starter Plan at $9.95 USD/month, Business Plan, Corporate Plan, Enterprise Plan and Reseller Plan.
FindBestWebHosting.com:
Web hosting is a competitive business. Why should customers opt for LFC Hosting? What makes LFC Hosting stand out from the crowd?
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 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 back-end capabilities of the Internet.
Our award-winning all-inclusive approach includes essentially everything you will ever need to do business online, allowing you room for expansion. Starting at only $9.95 USD/month, our business-oriented plans include:
- Many free domain names and e-mail accounts
- Plenty of disk space and bandwidth
- Support for virtually every database (including MySQL 5 and SQL Server 2008 at only $9.95 USD/month!) and development (PHP 5, ASP, .NET 3.5, Perl, JSP, CF) platform available
- E-commerce, SSL, and unbeatable SPAM and Virus protection
- A state-of-the-art 24/7 support and uptime guarantee with no setup fees and 30 days free!
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 thousands of clients in over 90 countries by, quite simply, offering a higher quality of service with many more features - everything you need to conduct secure e-commerce - at a lower overall cost than competing services.
When you host with LFC Hosting, the complexity is taken out of the decision, allowing you to focus your efforts on what's most important: growing your business!
FindBestWebHosting.com:
LFC offers a "24/7 Customer Service Guarantee". Please explain. Also brief us more about your customer support department?.
LFC Hosting has taken customer and technical support to a new level, setting a new standard in the industry. Since its conception, LFC Hosting's mission has been to provide an extremely high-quality reasonably-priced hosting service (starting at only $9.95/month) that includes everything a small business needs to leverage the Internet, with unsurpassed support and packaged through a consolidated business-friendly system, giving our clients the distinct advantage over their competition online. This is the basis for our award-winning 24/7 Customer Service Guarantee included free-of-charge with all hosting plans:
- 24/7 Toll-Free Telephone Support
- 24/7 Technical Support Ticket System
- Live Technical Support Chat from 7am-4pm CST M-F
We pride ourselves in employing and training among the most skilled, knowledgeable, and helpful technical support representatives, allowing us to provide an unsurpassed Quality of Support. Our award-winning customer service team will do their best to accommodate any requirement that you have whether within or beyond the scope of our regular hosting offerings; this is our specialty. Finally, unlike other web hosts, our tier-two technical support team is our Operations Department, bridging the gap between customer service representatives and network analysts, and absolutely ensuring that all issues that are escalated to this level are resolved quickly and correctly.
The future of your online company strongly relies on the efficiency of your web site, and your web host. If you are unable to prevent potential problems, and immediately rectify any problems which do occur, your company will ultimately suffer. This is why we have dedicated so many resources to ensure your support needs are exceeded.
When the time comes to make a decision on your web host, we trust that you will value our customer and technical support strategies and understand the infinite value of this unique component of our services.
FindBestWebHosting.com:
Blog hosting is very popular nowadays. Does LFC support Blog hosting?
Absolutely. A blog has become a fundamental part of a corporate online presence. Additionally, businesses serious about blogging now typically elect to implement and host their own blogging platform as this approach affords much more flexibility to develop a professional, customized blog over 'out-of-the-box' solutions like Blogger or TypePad. LFC Hosting fully supports most common blogging platforms, including the very popular open-source WordPress platform.
FindBestWebHosting.com:
Any plans for LFC to introduce green hosting?
Although we've never advertised this fact, LFC Hosting moved its staff and data center into our current location in 2000. This location was and continues to be recognized as a Green Workplace: http://www.gov.sk.ca/news?newsId=fd342754-4119-4afb-9852-7cfa5f062c9a
So, in effect, we were focused on operating "Green" long before it became a popular way to describe working to save our environment.
FindBestWebHosting.com:
LFC hosting platform has a hybrid model wherein Windows-native capabilities (likes of ASP 3.0, ASP.NET 3.5 , SQL Server 2008 ) are offered along with UNIX/Linux technologies (PHP 5, MySQL 5). Please explain.
In accordance with LFC Hosting's all-inclusive approach, we are unique in seamlessly offering full support for Windows-native capabilities like ASP 3.0, .NET 3.5 (+ ASP.NET) and SQL Server 2008 as well as UNIX/Linux technologies and scripts like PHP 5 and MySQL 5 with the same hosting plan!
Although we run Windows 2003 in the foreground, over half of our network is actually Linux. Windows 2003/IIS 6.0 servers are employed in the foreground to ensure optimal performance and stability of Windows capabilities (which typically only work well under Windows), as well as an increased level of security over a single platform. Then, "redirectors", router "port forwarding" and proprietary LFC technology "forward" all requests for Linux-specific technologies (ex: MySQL 5 databases and JSP/Servlets) to the appropriate Linux server clusters in the background!
LFC Hosting also takes full advantage of Linux's inherent network stability and performance by using it for all of our key network services, such as our load-balancing and fault-tolerant LVS directors/routers, disaster recovery systems, network monitoring systems, mail and backup servers, Control Panel, etc.
This process is transparent to you and your website visitors, but effectively achieves the best of both worlds. Thus, if you traditionally required a UNIX/Linux host, LFC Hosting is still the right choice!
FindBestWebHosting.com:
LFC also offers reseller package. What's unique about LFC's reseller package?
Priced at only $39.95 USD/month, our Reseller Package is the most comprehensive in the industry, allowing our reseller clients to extend LFC Hosting's All-Inclusive approach to their own customers, under their own brand.
LFC Hosting's Reseller Package works by allowing you to subdivide all of the features included with our reseller plan - web space, e-mail accounts, FTP accounts, ODBC DSNs, SQL databases, mailing lists, etc. - among all of your resold clients however you like. By reselling web space, you are able to provide the many back-end features (MySQL 5 and SQL Server 2008, PHP 5, ASP, .NET, Perl, Python, JSP, ColdFusion MX 7, e-commerce, and SSL support, Uptime Guarantee, E-mail Anti-SPAM & Virus, and much more) to your clients at no extra cost to you; it would simply not be feasible to offer all of these services if you were to run a small stand-alone hosting network yourself due to the cost of the software alone.
LFC's Resellers have the advantage of not having to worry about administering the network and incurring the overhead of doing so, allowing them to focus on providing the best possible rates and customer service to their clients. However, with most services, resellers do not have as much power over the network as if they were running it themselves, and need to contact their host company every time they need a major change made. As well, there is always the risk that the client will go directly to the host company and bypass the reseller. LFC Hosting has addressed these potential issues.
Aside from LFC Hosting's raved about Reseller Control Panel, and award-winning customer service, reliability, and network performance, LFC's resellers also receive bulk discounts on domains and POP3 accounts and reduced rates on web development for their clients.
In fact, LFC has quite a unique approach to web hosting. Most other web hosts provide relatively basic hosting, and then charge for extra services. Included in our All-Inclusive Reseller Package at only $39.95 USD/month is:
- 4500 MB Disk Space
- 500 Email Accounts, and Unlimited aliases and autoresponders
- 40 GB Bandwidth
- 7 Domain names (yourname.com) (add more for a small fee)
- Unlimited Wildcard subdomains
- Unlimited MySQL and SQL Server databases!
- Unlimited ODBC DSNs
- Unlimited FTP accounts
- Unlimited Mailing Lists
- Powerful, easy-to-use account control panel
- Free Advanced reseller client control panel (rebranded for your customers!)
- Free shopping cart software & SSL security
- Free domain name registration and transfer (registrar fee applies)
- PHP, ASP, .NET, Perl, Python & JSP
- Cold Fusion MX Support
- 24/7 Support & Uptime Guarantee
- Live technical chat center
- E-mail Anti-SPAM & Virus Protection
- 30 Days Free & No Setup or Hidden Fees!
- Spam and Virus blocking
- 24 hours a day, 365 days a year Toll-Free technical support
As you can see, our Reseller Package is All-Inclusive, taking the guesswork out of deciding which plan is right for you, and you can offer all of these features to your clients at no additional cost to you; there are simply no set up fees or hidden costs.
FindBestWebHosting.com:
Do you plan to offer Dedicated hosting or VPS hosting in the near future?
Although LFC Hosting offers Co-Located hosting for larger organizations in our in-house data center in Western Canada, we have no immediate plans to offer Dedicated or VPS hosting. While these are excellent, valuable and profitable offerings, we firmly believe that any business (including ours) should pick one niche that is aligned with its core competency and stick to it. Our core competency lies in meeting the needs of the average small business, many whom have little to no in-house tech savvy or need for advanced offerings such as this.
Therefore, our plans for the future are instead focused around launching more SaaS-oriented service offerings to help small businesses operate productively and grow without worrying about the technology behind the scenes.
FindBestWebHosting.com:
Please brief us on your Datacenters and server reliability.6/9/2009
After countless hours spent getting a web site up and running, planning and executing marketing campaigns, and filling orders, the last thing our customers want to worry about is the performance and reliability of their web host. Although it is rarely considered by small businesses, the performance of the web host can actually be the bottle-neck of your entire operation. If a web site loads too slow, or doesn't load at all, it will lose both credibility and customers.
Because of this we take our server reliability very seriously and have implemented many systems to ensure our customers' websites stay online at all times. These include One-of-a-Kind Indefinite Power Backup, High-Speed Upstream and Gigabit Internal Network, State-of-the-Art 24x7 Monitoring and Event Handling, Ethernet Power Controllers, Offsite Network Monitoring, Climate Control and Windows Security Management to name a few.
Our Advanced Automated Network Monitoring System is a key component of LFC Hosting's unique network infrastructure, allowing us to ensure that your website is available to the world 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Our network reliability metrics are among the best in the industry, ensuring no loss of visitors and therefore business to your website, and giving you, our customer, the distinct advantage over your competition.
FindBestWebHosting.com:
Please brief us on Server Uptime stats.
LFC Hosting is dedicated to providing a reliable, fast, and efficient web hosting service to our customers. Ensuring your web site is always accessible; we have fully integrated our Windows 2003 servers into our state-of-the-art 24x7 network monitoring system - Nagios, which monitors each server for optimal operation at all times. In the event that a problem occurs, Nagios attempts to correct it while also immediately notifying a technician 24/7. Our current server uptime statistics are as follows:
HTTP (Standard Web): 99.99%
HTTPS (Secure Web): 99.99%
CGI (Perl, ASP, PHP, etc.): 99.99%
FTP (File Transfer Protocol): 100.00%
SMTP (Outgoing Mail Server): 100.00%
POP3 (Incoming Mail Server): 100.00%
FindBestWebHosting.com:
LFC offers business-oriented plans. Does this include e-commerce? Please elaborate.
All of our hosting packages are E-Commerce ready, featuring a one-click Zen Cart shopping cart installation free-of-charge. LFC's e-commerce services also include merchant accounts for qualified applicants, live credit card processing and 128-bit SSL encryption, the highest form of widely supported Internet security native to all of LFC's hosting plans.
FindBestWebHosting.com:
Moving ahead: What are you future plans? How do you envision LFC 5 years from now?
This is always a challenging (but fun) question. Roughly nine years ago I answered a very similar question in an interview, predicting that, by 2005, web hosting would bear very little resemblance to what it did at that time (in 2000). However, with the exception of some significant technological advances (such as virtualization and cloud computing), this prediction proved largely wrong. In reality, 5 years is such a long time in this space that no one can possibly predict where their business will be in that amount of time, including companies such as ours that have been around for over a decade.
That said, at a high level, we envision moving (from a marketing perspective at least) higher up the value chain and further away from the underlying technological infrastructure. As I touched on earlier, our goal is to move towards delivering SaaS solutions that are better aligned with the real needs of small business owners, thereby freeing them from the complexities of technology and making many beneficial web-based solutions (ex: e-commerce, collaboration, marketing, CRM, etc.) open to small businesses that are barely leveraging technology at all today (beyond an accounting software package and perhaps a basic website that is).
FindBestWebHosting.com:
What's your take on Cloud hosting and Grid hosting:?
There is no doubt that the 'cloud' or 'grid' computing model offers huge advantages and is likely the future of hosting infrastructure. In fact, we make use of cloud hosting infrastructure internally already. However, at the same time, we believe that most small businesses (outside of the technology category, that is) have little interest in, or the time to be concerned with the underlying technological infrastructure behind the solutions that help them run and grow their businesses. Therefore, our strategy lies in positioning our business, brand and services around the 'solutions' rather than the 'technology' so that our customers don't have to worry about these complexities (because they know that we do).
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