Overall Editor's Rating
85%		Overall Rating
84%		Price
84%		Features
81%		Support
91%		Reliability

Business Operation
since 1996

Number of Websites Hosted
1800

Overview & Company Description
Did Paula Gigliotti, United Airport Parking choose EPIDirect.com because of its server flexibility and convenience to install more than 10 third party software? Or did Chris Beckett from AVIVA Consulting choose the company because of the EPIDirect.com's excellent integrated services to support its mobile workforce? The answer is both. If you are looking for a host deploying ASP.NET hosting technologies, consider browsing to http://www.epidirect.com

Founded in 1996, Ontario-based EPI Internet Direct, offers a range of comprehensive web hosting services and e-commerce hosting solutions that specialize in Microsoft technologies. Leveraging its wealth of hosting management technologies, programming and implementation expertise across multiple industry groups, EPI Internet Direct can deliver comprehensive, tailored services built around a flexible, ASP.NET internet-based platform that requires minimal start-up cost and time.

Small business and enterprises are increasingly seeking business hosting solutions to drive efficiently across their organization by turning data into useful information. The EPI Consulting and Deployment Services provides companies with the capabilities to finally make much better use of customer's hosting data, system and servers, to gain vital new intelligence from it and to extend that insight to more staff ­ helping them build better and smarter websites.

On the other hand, if you are only interested in hosting only, EPIDirect.com has a range of ASP hosting services that are packed with rich features. Its ASP entry level hosting plan comes at a cost of US$6.60 per month with 25MB of disk space, 5000GB bandwidth transfer, ASP.NET support, FrontPage Server Extensions FrontPage Statistical Analysis Support, Web Site Statistics, WebMail Internet E-Mail Service MS Access Database, ASP Tools: CDO, ASPEMail, ASPUpload.
 

Why we like this company

• One of the very few hosts in North America that provides technology consulting. The company assist customers to deploy network design and implementation, upgrade and migration, management and support including exchange disaster recovery of Microsoft technology based networks.
   
• One of EPI Internet Direct’s primary focuses is network security. The company also provide services to identify any weakness in network infrastructure and help companies to become proactive in guarding against security breaches.
   
• The company is certified to offer ASP.NET hosting services. The company is a Microsoft Certified Partner, Microsoft authorized Application Service Provider and member of the Microsoft Windows Telecommunications Alliance Program.
   
• Mass wealth of technical knowledge and are considered the experts in developing solutions using the latest Microsoft technologies since 1996.
   

Customer Support & Rating  81%  
When making any large-scale purchase, finding the lowest consulting and hosting price is often a top priority. But experienced customers understand that it's not — or at least it shouldn't be — the only priority. That's because a product's long-term value often depends on a vendor's ability and willingness to back it up with reliable support and service. EPI Internet Direct understands that a good customer support team cannot use a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, the hosting provider insist it must be based on the understanding of the customer's maintenance strategy and business needs.

Over the past 2 weeks, HostPulse has monitored the activities of the EPIDirect and gathered the satisfaction rating from its customers to find out how the company performed in the month of November 2004. EPIDirect offers technical support through email and telephone. The company also offers emergency support through pager. For mission critical application, customers can receive expanded access to patches, technical solutions, and proactive notification services upon request.

To minimize or eliminate costly troubleshooting delays for customer websites and help shift the company's maintenance strategy to a more proactive, preventive approach, EPIDirect.com insists that the support staff must provide a level of responsiveness to help customers solve problems quickly and improve production efficiency. From our investigation, we find that 8 of 10 email questions sent to them were answered within 30 minutes. The other 2 email were replied within 2 hours. Contact information can be found at http://www.epidirect.com/ContactInfo.htm.
 

Hosting Plan & Price that stand out  84%  
Entry Level, as described here: http://www.epidirect.com/WebH/SFees.htm. Works out to $6.60 per month (actual cost is $98.95 for 15 months of web site hosting)
 

Network Connection and Infrastructure
Technology upgradation, quality mission efficiencies, new product development, value-added services are a "must to do" in order to survive the competitive hosting market. EPI operates its own Data Center. The data center are fed by multiple high-speed fiber optic connections which terminate at a Cisco 6700 switch. This switch manages all external network traffic, routing all inbound traffic to the appropriate firewall protected server. Internally, traffic is routed among servers using a variety of smaller Cisco and D-Link switches.
 

Reliability Rating  91%  

•  Internet Seer Report for the second week in November 2004
  
  

  Day Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun Weekly Total Date 11/08 11/09 11/10 11/11 11/12 11/13 11/14 Outages 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Time on error 00:00 00:00 00:00 00:00 00:00 00:00 00:00 00:00 % Uptime 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 Connect time 0.11 0.11 0.11 0.12 0.11 0.11 0.11 0.11 Outages- number of times we were unable to access this URL Time on Error- the total time this URL was not available (hr:min) % Uptime- the percentage this URL was available for the day Connect Time- the average time in seconds to connect to this URL

  
   
• EPI software clients are located throughout the world, and have included such major corporations as BMW, Procter & Gamble, CitiBank, H. J. Heinz, Firestone, Congoleum Corporation, Kraft General Foods, Quaker Oats as well as hundreds of other corporations and government agencies. EPI clients can be found throughout the United States and Canada, as well as such locations as Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, India, China, Japan, Holland, Germany, Australia, Great Britain, Indonesia and dozens of other locations.
   
• To help ensure its thousands of websites' continuity, EPIDirect's technical staff have quality policies to improve the stability and reliability of hosting processes, enabling customers to recover from any data hazard in any event of service failure.
   
• EPI Cabling and Communications Services, a sister company of EPIDirect helps to supply the LAN and WAN infrastructure design and construction, cabling services, LAN closet design and implementation. digital network cabling and pre-wire services. This allows EPIDirect to concentrate in serving its customers and focus on strengthening its server stability and reliability.
   

Web Server Type
EPIDirect uses Windows Server 2003, with some older servers running Windows 2000. Typically, web servers are configured with 2GB of RAM RAID disk drives. Most are running with either P4 or Xeon processors. All EPIDirect web site hosting services support both traditional HTML as with as ASP and ASP.NET web sites. PHP and other programming languages are supported on request.
 

Other Services, Marketing and Design
EPI offers web site design and deployment services. They also offer hosting services for:

Traditional POP3 email (includes free anti-virus and anti-SPAM)
FTP Site download services
NNTP Newsgroup Services
Discussion Forums (Snitz, and ASP.NET)
Windows SharePoint Services
Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server
Microsoft Exchange Server email services (includes free anti-virus and anti-SPAM)
Microsoft Commerce Server
Microsoft Content Manager
Microsoft Project Server
Remote Desktop deployments using Microsoft Terminal Services.
 

Hosting Features & Rating  84%  

• FrontPage Server Extensions
• FrontPage Statistical Analysis Support
• Web Site Statistics
• ASP and ASP.NET Support
• MS Access Database Support
• ASP Tools: CDO, ASPEMail, ASPUpload
• SQL Server Support
• ISAPI Filter Support
• Nightly Backups to Tape
• 100% Up Time Guarantee
   

Testimonials

• Finding EPI was truly a blessing. In addition to being able to host the unique bundles of software used to build my first website, their team is able to meet all my business needs. I virtually have not had any down time with server issues in the year I've been with them.
  
  Paula Gigliotti, United Airport Parking
  http://www.unitedairportparking.com
   
• Aviva needed a complete set of integrated services to support our mobile workforce, and we needed high-availability. EPI Direct was the only vendor in our extensive evaluation that could completely meet our needs for Exchange, SharePoint, Web and File Storage/Backup services and provide the professional infrastructure and support to ensure the reliability we were looking for. Setup and configuration was fast and professional. Highly Recommended!
  
  Chris Beckett
  Senior Enterprise Architect
  AVIVA Consulting
  http://www.avivaconsulting.com
   
• www.hotelfun4kids.com has been with EPI Internet Direct for over a year and we are extremely pleased with the services provided. Our large site experienced many server problems with our previous host but with EPI Internet Direct we have not experienced any download or server difficulties. In fact the service has been excellent and customer support has been outstanding. The statistics service is invaluable for us. - Maureen Hall, President of Hotel and Leisure Living Services Ltd. publishing company of www.hotelfun4kids.com.
  
  Maureen Hall
  Hotel Fun 4 Kids/Hotel and Leisure Living Services Ltd.
  www.hotelfun4kids.com
   
• EPI has been a tremendous asset. They provide a high quality range of products at a low cost and great support. I am still amazed at the services they provide. They are quite honestly the answer I have been looking for in a service host provider and plan on migrating everyone I know to them.
  
  Bertram Tunnell
  http://www.girlfromqueens.com
   

Traffic Magnetism
Web users are attracted by EPI Internet Direct's hosting speed and other practical benefits. Once web users become customers, they are attracted by EPI Internet Direct's solution that provides most if not all of the features they need at a fraction of the cost and complexity.

Paying the hosting price of US$6.60 per month is affordable. This has also attracted web users along with the credibility of its Microsoft certified professional technical support team.
 

Accomplishments

• Microsoft Certified Partner
• One of the 100 Most Dynamic Web Hosting Companies year 2002 and 2003
   

Success Factors
For many years since 1996, EPI Internet Direct has been offering hosting services by coordinating critical business processes through the extensive use of computers, communication technology, networking technology and computerized data. The company is able to minimize a lot of risk associated with server purchasing, increase flexibility of each hosting plan and enhanced competitive advantages while retaining customers year after year. HostPulse investigated a few business processes that EPI Internet Direct does daily and concludes that the company is improving itself at least every 4 months through technology transformation, good customer service, troubleshooting internal issues, alliance with core suppliers to strengthen supplier relationships and reducing operational costs.

HostPulse is proud to honour EPI Internet Direct with a place in our list of the 100 Most Dynamic Web Hosting Companies, 2004. We hope to see more of EPI Internet Direct moving forward — whether it's an announcement like this or a growth in building successful customer relationship.