Main Customers
Lay-Z-Boy, Ethyl M. Chocolates, GTE, Shimano, Del Monte Foods, The Salvation Army, McDonalds, The United States Department of Commerce and Sierra Software

C I Host expanded its bandwidth three times in the last year to keep ahead of its customers' needs and ensure maximum uptime. 

By purchasing an OC3 from InterNap, a Seattle-based firm that provides patented route management technology, C I Host will be able to provide its customers with the best in web hosting service.

"The extra bandwidth and the superior routing technology of InterNap will provide our clients with the fastest, most reliable Internet connectivity available," said Christopher Faulkner, CEO of C I Host. "This is unmatched by any other hosting provider in the industry." 

C I Host has gone to 780 Mbits of bandwidth from 425, an increase that allows its network to use only 27 percent of bandwidth at peak times, down from 35 percent before the increase. In addition, by purchasing bandwidth from multiple backbone providers, more than 98 percent of the Internet is viewed as a private network, providing C I Host with unparalleled network performance and network availability."

Chris Faulkner's love affair with computers started when he was eight years old and his parents plunked down three grand for him to have an IBM with one of the first Intel® 8088 processors. It had a 9-inch amber screen, weighed 35 pounds and ran on DOS 2.1 - no Windows®, no graphical interface with its user-friendly point and click - all text commands.

It was 1986, a time when grade school kids - if they had computers in school or at home - were mostly at the stage of being enthralled with the fun of programming do-loops or creating six-foot-long banners for birthday parties.

But Chris was already on the decidedly different path that would make him the CEO of one of the fastest growing and highly rated e-businesses in the world before his 25th birthday.

"I got books and started to learn the DOS operating system," Faulkner said. "After I conquered software, I was immediately intrigued by how computers were built. I started taking them apart and learning about each component."

He would remove the hard drive, the RAM, the processors and the motherboard. From them, he learned about power and semi-conductors and how the motherboards were constructed.

Not content to just examine computers, Faulkner began upgrading, repairing and maintaining them and got his first job at a computer consulting firm, Connor Consulting, when he was 14 years old.

About this time, he says, "the entrepreneur gene kicked in," and he opened his first business at 15. It was a sports memorabilia store, "ScoreBoard Enterprises," which was successful enough to be sold two years later and provide the financing for Faulkner's next enterprise, Central Amusement Company.

Central Amusement, a vending and arcade company, became the third largest vending company in Texas with more than 2,400 vending and amusement games throughout the state. After Faulkner graduated in 1995 from Grapevine High School, Central Amusement was sold and Faulkner entered Southern Methodist University.

While a freshman, he formed Creative Innovations, a consulting firm that helped businesses learn how to use the Internet. Faulkner quickly noticed a need to house the web sites he was constructing and formed a second company, C I Host, in December of 1997, when he transferred to Baylor University in Waco.

"I purchased books on Linux® and Unix® and Apache Web Server and began learning the ins and outs of web hosting, building servers with a company in Chicago," Faulkner said. As the company grew throughout 1998, Faulkner scrambled to keep up with the phone calls and emails from clients.

"As technical questions from clients came up, I would research them one by one if I didn't already know the answer," Faulkner said. "I would wake up in the middle of the night to take calls from the UK and other overseas clients. After about ten months, I had read every book known to man on Web hosting and knew it like the back of my hand."

The breakthrough came in 1998. In its first six months, C I Host set a new record by being the first start-up company to break into the top 25 web hosting companies in the world, as ranked by the now defunct Web Host List. 

In 1999, C I Host opened its first, multimillion center in Texas. In 2000, the company opened two more centers in Los Angeles and Chicago, and by the end of 2000, C I Host had expanded its facilities to house 2,000 servers.

C I Host has seen a 200% increase in growth each year since its inception. It is consistently ranked among the top five web hosting companies out of 16,000 in the world by c|net's Ultimate Web Host List, HostIndex.com, and Web Host Directory. C I Host has 150 employees, and more than 149,000 clients, mostly small and medium-sized business, in 179 countries. It adds 5,000 new clients a month and is expanding globally.

C I Host will open a data center in London in March, 2002, and in Frankfort, Germany; Japan and India by the end of the year.

C I Host has scored more than its share of advertising firsts along the way, due in no small part to Faulkner's acute marketing acumen and sense of adventure. In 1999, C I Host emblazened its name across Evander Holyfield's truck for his 1999 heavyweight championship bout in Las Vegas against Lennox Lewis. And in 2001, the firm sponsored the return of Howard Stern to radio station KYNG-FM in Dallas-Fort Worth.

"Winners are at the top of their game, whether it is in web hosting, boxing, or having huge audiences listen to you on radio and see you on television," Faulkner said. "We are going to keep on winning and growing."

C I Host has been consistently active in keeping the Internet healthy and safe. The firm was one of the few that completely patched its servers against Code Red in 2001, thus saving its clients most of the headaches of that worm. In addition, Faulkner sits on the board of the International Federation of Safe Child Web Sites. 

"The Internet will stand as one of the most promising and epoch-changing developments of the late 20th and early 21st centuries," Faulkner said. "It is the responsibility of all of us associated with the Internet to keep it robust, accessible and safe for all our global citizens."

Yes. This news release explains our most recent upgrade of our customer service program.

C I Host, the fastest-growing leader in e-business solutions and the Web hosting industry, where the customer has always been at the center, is restructuring its technical and customer support services to further enhance service.

"I am determined to do whatever it takes, to spend whatever money we have to, to hire as many people as we need, to have the best support team in the industry," said Christopher Faulkner, CEO of C I Host. "We want to not only meet, but exceed, every expectation a customer has of us."

To more effectively monitor support calls, escalations to higher levels of service and call times, C I Host is splitting its support organization into one group for the company's direct clients and one for its resellers' end user clients. Within each of those groups, the team is further divided between customer service and technical support.

"A full-time customer service department of 10 people will be hired to deal exclusively with customer concerns over support levels or ongoing issues that have not been resolved correctly or in a timely manner," Faulkner said. "Now our customers will have somewhere to turn instantly for help if an issue is not resolved to their 100 per cent, complete satisfaction."

Additional resources will bolster the activities of each new division. New managers will oversee separate day, prime time, deep night and weekend staff, and 50 phone lines will be available to handle the increased capacity.

"We are installing a new phone system that will allow us to tell the callers how long their wait time will be and how many callers are ahead of them," Faulkner said. "The system will determine exact hold times and give customers on hold updated wait times every three minutes."

Technical problems that can't be resolved by a Level I technician will now move more quickly to a Level II technician through live Level II phone lines.

"No longer will customers be required to wait for a trouble ticket to be resolved by a Level II technician," Faulkner said. "Now the Level II technician will be able to take over the call from the Level I technician instantly and resolve the problem while the client is still on the phone."

To see the "big picture" of how customer and technical support calls are flowing every second of the day and night, C I Host will install huge electronic wallboards in each call center. These ACD wallboards will show the call queues and display in real-time how many calls are holding, the hold times and the call times for each technician logged into the queue. 

According to preset numbers, the wall board will change the color of the queues from green to yellow to red depending on number of callers and hold time. 

"Our goal is to get 100% of all calls answered within seven minutes," Faulkner said. "We are also hiring 20 new technicians just for the Level I and Level II call center and five new people to staff the chat rooms full time."

These improvements are over and above C I Host's aggressive quality control program. 

Every day, 90 percent of the customers who have sought help receive return calls asking about their experience. Quality assurance staff members ask if the service tech or company representative had a friendly, professional attitude, if the proper information was given and if it resolved the problem.

"We call back almost every individual who speaks with us just to make sure they're happy," Faulkner said. "The information is compiled into a database and charted weekly for my review. So far, 95 per cent of the people who have been called said they were extremely happy with the support they received."

Quality control of our technical support system; fully redundant network for security; broad range of services and prices; wireless enabled web sites. 

Our customer service is the best in the industry. That's the main reason that our churn rate is so low. We provide all the cutting edge Internet tools through a broad array of strategic alliances. But we also back that up with a customer service program that makes sure our clients' websites are properly maintained, their questions are answered and they have the tools to run a successful and profitable e-Business.

To continue putting the customer first and stay ahead of technological developments to give our clients the edge in whatever business they run.