Strengths
- Customer Service
- Reliability
- Network Speed
- All-inclusive Business-oriented Approach
- Automation
- Reseller Plan
Main Customers
Company and Website's Objectives
The LFC Hosting corporate website (www.lfchosting.com)
was re-developed in the first quarter of 2002. Several
months of research and conceptualization went into the
development of the LFC Hosting corporate website, including
deciding what content should be provided and how it can be
provided most efficiently and concisely, and what paths our
different types of visitors should take through the site.
The objective was to create a professional, widely supported
site that would serve as our sales person as well as offer a
wealth of highly organized, hierarchical information.
The LFC hosting website has hundreds of pages, many of which
are typically accessed through the powerful search tool;
however, the homepage has only a few navigation items.
Users can dig as deep as they wish to find more in-depth
information.
The website was also developed to be fast to load. In
fact, the entire website including all images and pages is
only a few MBs in size. Finally, the LFC Hosting
website is a "smart website". In other
words, it tracks the paths that visitors take through the
site. The testimonials that appear on each page, for
example, are specially targeted to the type of visitor that
is seeing them. As well, the LFC staff monitor this
data and make adjustments if visitors are traveling unintended paths through the website.
LFC plans to gain a major share in the web hosting market
over the next 2-3 years by providing superior business-level
service aimed at quality. LFC already has and
plans to continue delving into other e-commerce applications
including credit card processing for Canadian merchants and
versatile large-scale turnkey shopping cart solutions for
typical small business customers. In 3-4 years, LFC
intends to pioneer a major e-commerce-related research and
development facility to innovate new hosting and e-commerce
services for the changing paths of the WWW.
Briefly describe a few top-notch hosting features that LFC
Hosting is providing for its clients.
- Technical Support
Catering to businesses with extraordinary customer
service requirements, LFC
Hosting provides many
innovative customer service options, including unlimited
toll-free phone support, LFC's praised and easy to use
tech support trouble ticket system with maximum one day
response time, far superior to the standard e-mail
support provided by competing hosts, and unique live
online technical support video chat to get your problems
solved immediately!
- Reliability
LFC
Hosting's network monitoring and notification
systems, repair and recovery procedures, and emergency
customer support request channels are next to none.
All of our servers are protected by high-end Liebert UPS
(Uninterruptible Power Supply) battery power backups,
able to sustain our network for much longer than is
needed for our natural gas generators to become
activated. Our generators utilize a constant supply of
natural gas and, as such, are able to supply power
indefinitely in the event of an extended power outage.
Our shared servers are running a redundant SCSI RAID
configuration, giving you maximum efficiency with a
failsafe server crash fallback while being protected by
a custom firewall configuration.
- 5 Domain Names
All of our business-level plans include support for up
to five domain names (www.yourname.com)
free of charge, a major advantage in hosting with LFC -
only $3.60/domain with our business plan. As most
websites grow, the need arises to obtain multiple domain
names, often simply for marketing purposes. Through your
control panel you are able to automatically manage
domain names and subdivide your account, allowing each
domain name to load a separate website!
With LFC
Hosting's all-inclusive, no hidden fees
approach, your hosting costs remain the same as your
website grows. While you only require one domain name,
you will be paying similar costs as with competing
services. However, with competing services, you would
need to register a new account every time you wish to
add another domain name; with LFC
Hosting, your costs
remain constant.
- SQL Server and MySQL
Support
All of our business-level plans include 25 MB on our
dedicated SQL server providing the fastest possible
access to SQL databases. SQL space is considered
independent from the web space included with our hosting
plans, whereas many hosts consider it as part of the
normal web space quoted with a hosting plan. Database
access rights, etc. can be managed using the SQL
Enterprise Manager remotely (SQL Server 2000 only) or
through scripting (ASP or otherwise), whereas most
competing services limit you to the latter.
LFC
Hosting offers superior SQL Server and MySQL
database administration with the ability to manage
database DSNs, users, and user permissions, view
database statistics, download and restore database
backups, all on the fly through your account control
panel.
What led to the founding of LFC Hosting in May 1998?
LFC
Hosting's parent company, Loose Foot Computing
Limited began in 1996 as a web design and development and
Internet software development house. By early 98, LFC recognized the lucrative nature of web hosting at the
time, and, in response to constant requests for quality
hosting from our development clients, we began hosting as a
reseller.
Although we have remained a full-service company, upon
discovering that web hosting network administration and
marketing better met the skillsets of its staff, we, in the
second half of 1998, developed our own in-house hosting
network and began marketing hosting as our flagship
product. LFC
Hosting, our new hosting brand grew
steadily until late 2000, when it exploded as a result of
the launch of our all-inclusive approach to web hosting and
a variety of other business-oriented services.
LFC
Hosting continues to grow exponentially and is emerging
as an industry leader, having recently doubled in size in
less than six months
In which customer sub-segments is LFC Hosting seeing most
growth in demand for hosting services?
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. As a result, resellers are meeting the
emerging need for personalized service in the hosting
industry. As well, resellers often have the loyalty of
their local community and typically the client base of a
secondary business, development, marketing, etc.
Loyalty is hard to come by in web hosting. We foresee
a bright future for the reselling industry, particularly as
the tools for the reseller continue to improve.
LFC is constantly working to improve our reseller offerings
above all. Over the last few months alone we have
implemented a variety of improvements to our reseller
hosting service, including various improvements to our
control panel, anonymous WebMail, multiple aliased
nameserver options, etc. We are currently in the
process of developing the LFC Control Panel v.3. The
flagship feature of this new release will be the most
sophisticated and customizable reseller control panel on the
market, allowing the resold client the complete flexibility
of the reseller. The reseller will be able to control
exactly what features the resold client has access to, make
the reseller control panel look exactly like their own
website, give the resold client access to anonymous help
information, and set a whole suite of limits on domains,
POP3s, DSNs, databases, FTPs, etc.
What hosting features do your
customers find most useful?
- Good Customer Service
- Good Reliability
- Administrative Features
- 5 Domain Names
- Support for many
development platforms
- FrontPage 2002 Extensions
- 5 DSNs
- Cold Fusion Support
- SQL Server 2000 and MySQL
Support
Have you formed alliances with other vendors to penetrate
new markets and gain competitive advantage?
LFC is committed to forming
alliances with other firms that are able to offer a
particular service that is of use to our customers in a more
cost-effective manner. We have formed alliances to
offer the following services to our customers as part of our
"one-stop-shop" approach:
- Merchant Accounts
- Live Credit Card
Processing
- Website Design/Development
- Programming
- Project Management
- Online Marketing
What is LFC Hosting 's
technical direction, such as its Web strategy and hosting
plans for penetrating new markets?
We have maintained a solid
handle on the market, anticipating change and adapting to it
quickly, allowing us to penetrate new markets more quickly
than our competition. Our corporate structure allows
for extreme flexibility and speed of decision making, a
requirement for any IT company to last in today's
marketplace. As the first Canadian host to support WAP
(reported by HostWhois in the fall of 2001) we were also one
of the first hosts to provide inherent support for the .NET
Framework. These features are immediately provided
free-of-charge to all of our existing business customers,
giving them the advantage online.
Recently, we completely redeveloped our self-service
solution, the LFC Control Panel v.3 allowing us to provide
unsurpassed automation to business users and resellers.
It was mentioned in one of
the internet surveys, that the majority of unsatisfied
customers would ignore any future products or internet
services without saying a word. That means web hosting
providers don't get an opportunity to correct a mistake. How
do you encourage your customers to let LFC Hosting know when
they are unhappy so your support department can rectify the
situation?
In our technical support
Trouble Ticket System, our clients are encouraged to contact
the technical support representative's manager if they are
unsatisfied with the resolution to their issue. We
have a set policy for quickly and effectively dealing with
support discrepancies, including offering incentives to the
client to remain with LFC. Customers threatening
cancellation are instantly escalated to our Vice President.
Company
Descriptions
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 state-of-the-art connection and servers
ensure rapid response times and thus no loss of visitors to
your web site.
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 backend capabilities of the Internet.
Our all-inclusive approach, with many free domain names,
POP3 accounts, and essentially everything you will ever need
to do business online, allows you room for expansion; 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
clients in over 50 countries. Our reliable on-site network
was built with business in mind.
We are simply able to offer a higher quality of service with
many more features, everything you need to conduct secure
electronic commerce, at a lower cost overall than competing
services.
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