Web Hosting Provider Hostway Teams up with Northwestern's Dance Marathon on the Web

Dance Marathon, currently in its 32nd year at Northwestern University, is one of the world's largest student-run philanthropies. To reach their 2006 goal of exceeding their previous year's fund raising total of $625,000, they wanted to expand their online capabilities. Hostway, a leading provider of Web hosting and managed services, was eager to help this Chicago-area university in their philanthropic fund raising efforts by providing them free Web hosting to support the official DM Web site.

Dance Marathon's Web site, http://www.nudm.org/, was previously hosted on the student group server at Northwestern. Due to size and access restrictions, this particular server was not designed to handle professional developments, such as video streaming, that DM wanted to add to enhance their site in 2006.

"Hostway is always eager to find opportunities to give back to the community and Dance Marathon's success and commitment to its beneficiaries is extremely impressive to us," said John Lee, VP of global marketing and general manager for Hostway. "We feel like the lucky ones being asked to be involved with this event."

Hostway was referred to the Dance Marathon executive board as a reliable hosting provider by the professional Web site developer that offered to create their site. Hostway currently hosts the Web developer's company site and looking at Hostway's past dedication of providing free Web hosting to various organizations such as Recruiters for Katrina and Baylie for Brains, he saw Hostway as a perfect fit to support this philanthropic organization.

"We solicited Hostway's services because they were a local company proven for reliability," said David Kim, Dance Marathon executive board member. "Our old server would crash and Dance Marathon would lose money because people could not donate online. We're incredibly happy with the service we've received this year."

DM now includes 600 dancers, each couple raising at least $750 for the honor of dancing, and thousands of student volunteers. Since its inaugural year, DM has raised over $6.5 million for various charities. During the 30 hours on the weekend of March 3rd, over 15,000 spectators are expected to visit the Norris University Student Center where the Dance Marathon takes place to support the dancers and to take part in events such as a kid's carnival and a 5k run.

For more information on DM events, check out the DM calendar at www.nudm.org/calendar.

About Hostway

Hostway Corporation provides Web hosting and managed services to more than 400,000 customers worldwide. Hostway helps individuals, small businesses and large enterprises achieve more value from state-of-the-art Web-based technologies by reducing their complexity and cost. Founded in 1998, Hostway is one of the five largest Web hosting companies in the world with offices in North America (Chicago (HQ), Austin, Tampa and Vancouver), Europe (Belgium, France, Frankfurt, Hannover, London and Netherlands), Asia (Korea) and Australia (Sydney). For more information about Hostway Corporation, please visit www.hostway.com or call 1-866-467-8929.