John Zdanowski

Tell me aboutyourself and your role at Affinity.

"I was one of the original co-founders of Affinity Internet, Inc. Now I lead Affinity's efforts in strategy, product management and M&A.

Essentially my role, like others at the company, is to make sure Affinity continues to earn a top spot in the industry with customers by offering superior services."

What is Affinity's history?What is the company's role in the hosting industry?

"Since our inception in 1999, we have focused on meeting our customers hosting needs with a high quality of service. Like many others, we initially grew through a mergers and acquisitions. Unlike others, we focused on a few strategic acquisitions that fit various niches in the hosting space and then we carefully integrated them. This enabled us to continue growing each acquisition profitably.

Today, Affinity sells its services through five brands, currently ValueWeb, Bigstep, HostSave, WinSave, and SkyNetWEB.

A leader in the industry, we're growing fast. Affinity is now the No. 3 hosting company focused totally on serving the small to medium-sized business market (SMB)."

Why did Affinity decideto have multiple brands?

"Affinity has a multi-brand strategy so we can offer SMB owners a hosting program that best fits their specific needs and technical skills. We don't want to have to ask our customers to adapt to us, we adapt to them."

Can you explain thedifferent brands?

We have five different brands, as I mentioned before, each of them addresses a different audience of the SMB market.

Some brands are designed for customers that require a lot of help getting their sites set up and need support afterward. Some are for tech-savvy customers that just want a good, reliable hosting service.

Bigstep would be a perfect choice for entrepreneurs with little or no technical skill, but who want to create and maintain their own web sites. Bigstep offers a series of intuitive templates to get their web-based business up and running quickly.

On the other hand, if a customer wants to have someone else set up his site and needs a higher end ecommerce offering with excellent technical support, he might choose our ValueWeb brand.

Affinity's two discount brands, WinSave and HostSave, were designed for customers with a high level of technical skill who just want hosting at a minimum price - ‘Hosting without all the crap' is our tagline there.

Finally, SkyNetWEB is our dedicated server and managed services brand, which is for companies who need their own custom server configuration.

Will Affinity acquireadditional hosting companies in the future?

At Affinity, we're always looking to address new segments of the SMB market.

We look for companies with a similar philosophy of high customer service and those that will complement our current products.

How did Affinity becomea top-ranked company? How does it hold its position at the top?

It's simple. Affinity became one of the largest hosting companies by focusing on what we are good at: servicing the needs of our SMB customers. Instead of trying to be everything to everyone, we made a conscious effort to be everything to a specific market segment - SMBs.

We are able to maintain our top position through our cost efficient infrastructure and lithe integration of new features and services. We are always listening to our customers and adding features that make it easy for them to have the sites they want.

What impact you havemade on the industry?

We have proven that web hosting is a profitable business by making it more than just a commodity business. Since inception, Affinity has consistently grown faster than the industry average. A big reason for our consistent growth is that our customers have a great experience and refer more customers to us.

This year we are on track to grow 20-30 percent.

We have given our competitors something to think about and proven to our customers that we aren't just a service provider, but rather a partner.

What challenges will theindustry face in 2003?

The challenges any company in this industry will face are how to cost effectively run the business, while still providing customers with non-stop good service and technical support.

That's why we built our Affinity Hosting Platform, a clustered server environment that allows us to continually add thousands of customers at a time without affecting our ability to provide continuous uptime and superior customer support.

Any hostingcompany better have a rock-solid infrastructure, excellent customer supportand scalability if it wants to compete in this business in the future.