Overall Editor's Rating
89%		Overall Rating
96%		Price
87%		Features
82%		Support
93%		Reliability

Business Operation
since 2001

Number of Websites Hosted
2500
 

Overview & Company Description
The ability to efficiently manage, analyze and host business information can determine whether a hosting provider is an industry leader or one that is lost in the crowd. And with over hundreds of hosts on the internet ready to rent their Web server space and e-mail addresses for a monthly price tag that ranges from a dollar to hundreds of dollars, HostPulse decides to investigate the late entrants as well as the experienced providers that have been the driving force of the hosting market in United States.

One of the websites that HostPulse.com particularly visited several times is EarthlingWebHosting.com. We have also talked to Vincent Pitetti, founder of EarthlingWebHosting.com. He believes the power and simplicity of hosting technology offers the lowest-cost, safest and most-efficient access to all data, for all web users. Based on that, the company is leveraging on Web-enabled hosting applications such as Cpanel, Fantastico, Apache Handlers, which can be integrated with many useful website tools and applications to implement and offer these hosting services to online users.

Founded in 2001 and currently hosting over 2,500 websites, EarthlingWebHosting, offers Linux-based web hosting and reseller hosting services to developers, programmers and small-to-medium size companies. The company also helps enterprises to host their websites. The company's Linux managed hosting services enable businesses to outsource some or all of their data management requirements. This allows these big companies to stay focused on their main businesses, and leave all server administration to the company.

Supporting this endeavor are services that implement, sustain and manage the whole stack. Oracle is the only company that provides all of these components. Oracle's e-business solution is unique in the marketplace because it offers the broadest set of services with the best quality of service.
 

Why we like this company

• We like the fact that when a web user hosts with EarthlingWebHosting.com, the company immediately provides Fantastico script controller to allow the user start installing and designing his website.
   
• The company allows you to test drive its hosting account before you sign up.
  Web users can try one of its fully functional web hosting accounts FREE for 10 days. Web users can upload some files, run some scripts, test things out, try out all the features available before making any payment.
   
• This company uses 8Gb of DDRAM for all its web servers!
   
• Affordable hosting services, starting from US$4.99 per month.
  
   

Customer Support & Rating  82%  

• At the heart of EarthlingWebHosting's good Customer Support and Help Desk software system, is a strong customer contact repository. Its support solution not only provides technical staff with access to customer accounts and customer contact entities, but also its relationships with customers, and among themselves. Customers and technical support can see a "360-degree view" of customer's contacts, including all the requests, the interaction histories, notes and attachements, recorded from the current or other hosting accounts. Each customer has their own "BBS-styled" forum, so that your team members can exchange and collaborate on ideas, company researches, documents, etc.
   
• The company uses automatic email notification to increase speed and simplify communication between customers and support staff. Cases are automatically routed to pre-defined service representatives to facilitate optimal response.
   
• Web-based support provides customers with a variety of technical resources to troubleshoot problems on their own. The knowledgebase allows users to navigate and search for manuals and tech notes, receive notifications about products, submit online support requests, download software updates and communicate with customer support specialists through Web forms, e-mail and other online features.
   
• The company conducts regular surveys every 4 months to measure accurately customer satisfaction, ease of hosting management, and identify areas of hosting improvement.
   
• Over the past 3 weeks, HostPulse has monitored the activities of the EarthlingWebHosting and made 6 calls to find out how the company has performed in the month of November 2004. From our investigation, 5 of the calls we made to enquire about hosting were answered professionally. One of the calls we made was not answered.
   
• Support calls are escalated based on the level of the customer's problem to help provide rapid access to experienced technical support staff.
  
   

Hosting Plan & Price that stand out  96%  
There are four hosting plans, Personal Plan, Professional Plan, Business Plan and Corporate Plan. They are priced at US$4.99, US$9.99, US$19.99 and US$29.99 per month respectively.

The Professional Plan is a better value plan in terms of disk space. For US$9.99 per month, you get an extra 150MB for a total of 250MB compared to the Personal Plan's disk space of 100MB that is selling for US$4.99 per month
 

Network Connection and Infrastructure
Earthling Web Hosting's data center features 65,000 square feet of space with redundant UPS, air conditioning, generator backup and smoke detection/fire protection systems. The data center is connected to the Internet through 14 Gigabit Ethernet links from seven separate backbone providers, each one running fiber optic cables into the data center through two separate entry points. The backbone providers are: Time Warner, Verio, Cogent, Williams Telecommunications, Allegiance, MFN and Savvis. Earthling Web Hosting believes in high quality. All the servers are built with the best hardware and highest standards.

Reliability Rating  93%  

• The servers that EarthlingWebHosting are using give the company the extra hard disk space requirement, along with room for easy expandability and RAID 5 redundancy and reliability that features three power supplies, three internal fans and dual controller.
   
• EarthlingWebHosting's carrier-class reliability guarantees unsurpassed uptime and is very important in a business environment where web users are accessing the data stored on the e-mail/Web server 24x7 every day of the year. The modular architecture of the data center where EarthlingWebHosting's servers are located allows the company to expand and grow as its storage needs grow.
   
• The company is able to provide "right-time" hosting solutions without impacting the reliability or performance of the online transaction processing systems.
   
• EarthlingWebHosting offers MYSQL database only offers numerous benefits such as easy installation, embeddability, low administration and low total cost of ownership, increased performance, reliability and scalability.
  
   

Web Server Type
Customer web sites are hosted on servers based on the following hardware specifications:

Dual Xeon 2.4 Ghz processors with 8 GB DDR Ram
2 x 73 GB SCSI Hard Drives

Hosting Features & Rating  87%  

• PHP
• phpMyAdmin
• MySQL database
• CGI
• Perl Modules
• CGI-Bin
• XML
• Python
• Frontpage Extensions
• Sub-domains
• Cron Jobs
• FTP
• SSI
• POP3/SMTP servers
• Webmail PGP Mail
• Spam Assassin
• Chatroom
• Scripts Library
• MIME Types
• Apache Handlers
• cPanel X w/Fantastico De Luxe
   

Traffic Magnetism
Customers are attracted to EarthlingWebHosting.com's affordable hosting plan at US$4.99 per month and the Fantastico features available. The company is aware of the fact that current EarthlingWebHosting customers are attracted to the simplicity of use and comprehensiveness of services EarthlingWebHosting offers. This simplicity message prompted the hosting company to develop a Linux-based ad campaign. The company also has the technology to get good data quality and, with the ability to integrate customer data from multiple hosting sources, EarthlingWebHosting is always able to indentify its most profitable customers and better target its hosting services to its customers' individual needs.

"As a profitable online company, hosting security is one of our greatest allies right now," said Vincent Pitetti "Our current customers are extremely pleased with our hosting services and features. To capture additional market share and generate even more revenue, the next step is to clearly and concisely communicate these hosting offerings through an effective ad campaign."
 

Success Factors
Unlike many similar companies, Vincent Petitti's EargthlingHosting.com has always been privately funded. Perhaps because it dones not need to satisfy quick-buck investors, the company has been able to approach the hosting business a bit differently than others.

EarthlingWebHosting.com uses a third-party data center to host their servers. The decision to lease the facilities certainly carried a lower up-front cost. Vincent said that the company's management team, which has roots in other business development, believes lower cost of operation gives them both greater convenience and better customer service flexibility.

Vincent also describes the company as "conservatively financed, cash-flow positive, and self-funding on future capital expenditures," which, he says, are just a few of the reasons EarthlingWebHosting.com has seen growth from 0 to 2500 customers since June 2002. The company's conservative approach may seem a bit unusual for a tech firm on the web, but in the face of major host bankruptcies and closings it seems to lend credence to the theory that the fundamentals of building a stable business haven't changed.

The company has its target to meet every month and focuses on selling its shared hosting services especially the US$19.99 Business Plan hosting account.With that ultimate focus in mind, the company believes it has made great strides last year in helping businesses throughout the world to get good hosting accounts. To ensure its servers are operating healthily at all times, EarthlingWebHosting.com has created an unprecedented internal process that analyzes network traffic, servers and quality of bandwidth. This analysis boils down to the fundamental server quality and accuracy of a server system, so that the company can know and take action at anytime to correct the processes, the applications and events that are happening in each of its web servers.

The company's founder also agrees that the company's financial stability plays a role in its current success. But Vincent believes the two most important factors to customers are the blending of hosting features provided, and the customer satisfaction level that EarthlingWebHosting.com is able to provide.

Now more than ever, the company has developed hosting solutions that provide concrete and significant value to customers; but this is nothing new to the technical staff at EarthlingWebHosting. The company has been delivering actual and immediate hosting value to its customers for 2 years – saving them hosting expenses and ensuring a rapid return on their technology investments.