C I Host Celebrates 9th Anniversary as Leader, Continues Expansion

C I Host, a global leader in Web hosting and Internet infrastructure, celebrates nine years of continued growth and expansion this month, with more than 250,000 customers in 182 countries, a solid financial footing and an comprehensive array of products and services.

As the Internet has grown in importance as a vital business tool and essential part of life for companies, students and families, C I Host has expanded its product line and fine-tuned its services to lead the pack in the web-based world.

"We have been extremely fortunate to be able to play a major role in driving the direction of eCommerce and in keeping the Internet robust, safe and accessible for millions of people over the past nine years," said Christopher Faulkner, CEO of C I Host. "To have been part of this crucial stage of wired and wireless economic development has been an incredible opportunity."

With wholly-owned, state-of-the-art data centers in Dallas, Los Angeles, Chicago and Newark - and a planned opening in London - C I Host has grown and prospered throughout a time that saw exuberant peaks and challenging valleys in the high tech industry.

Over the past year, C I Host has expanded its facilities, developed an anti-scam toolbar and other strategies to protect Internet users from Internet crime, and pioneered the use of web-based technology to expand the market for musicians and artists to sell their products and services and to help nonprofit organizations linked with the arts to raise funds to help those hurt by national disasters.

In August, C I Host opened a state-of-the-art data center in Newark, New Jersey, a half-mile from Rutgers University and just eight miles from Manhattan.

In conjunction with the other three centers, the Newark center provides C I Host's customers unparalleled opportunities for geographic content distribution and geographic load balancing.

The Newark center also has a direct, private fiber connection to the planned London facility, thus enabling private data transfer between the two facilities. The London center will be in The Docklands, just a short hop from the city center.

Besides its four data centers, C I Host has invested in an exceptionally large, robust, redundant and reliable network - now one of the largest privately owned fiber-optic cable networks in the world.

That vast network, in connection with the data centers, allows C I Host to provide its customers with geographic load balancing, which means that data on a company's Web site can be served from the C I Host servers that are closest to the customer accessing the company's information.

"We know that millions of dollars of business can be earned or lost online depending on whether the customer can navigate the site quickly," Faulkner said. "So we put a major emphasis on the quick download times that geographic load balancing provides."

At the close of 2005, C I Host joined forces with Involved, Inc., to host a New Year's Eve webcam of the New York City and Los Angeles segments of a worldwide online auction of VIP packages linked to the top DJs and clubs in the world. Proceeds from the event, which included donated concert tickets and visits with such celebrities as the world-renowned DJs Carl Cox, Sander Kleinenberg and Sasha, went to benefit UNICEF.

"This was a way that we could engage the good will of a generation that considers both music and the Internet to be integral parts of their lives," Faulkner said. "These young men and women probably aren't reached through traditional appeals for help, but an online auction of events they love is a perfect way to give them the opportunity to help the children of the world."

C I Host is committed to enabling customers - from musicians to corporate CEOs - to use streaming media effectively. In January, the company upgraded the free media servers that come with every account to the latest version of Real.com's Helix Server Unlimited, a top-of-the-line multi-format, cross-platform streaming server that delivers the highest quality experience to wired and wireless devices.

This commitment has made Faulkner a sought-after speaker on the use of streaming media and interactive services to the music industry, in particular, the overall advantages of this new technology in providing new revenue streams for artist as it expands the way people listen to and buy music.

Over the past nine years, C I Host has incurred no long-term debt and has been able to anticipate economic changes accurately enough to successfully ride out the collapse of the dot.com bubble and even show growth during that time.

In large part, that growth has occurred because C I Host has consistently put its customers at the center of its operation - using quality-controlled customer service programs, a live chat room with the CEO, customer satisfaction surveys and a "Customers Rule" program to keep the focus on the needs of its clients.

"We have been blessed with tremendous success, and none of it would have been possible without the support of our customers," Faulkner said. "They are truly the collective CEO of my company."

In 2004, C I Host pulled all of its customer-centered programs together into a new Customer Experience Initiative, "Customers Rule." To develop the program, C I Host examined every customer contact point and thought about what customers would need at those crucial times.

"Every contact made throughout the entire lifecycle of a customer's relationship with C I Host is made with the utmost professionalism, accuracy and thoroughness," Faulkner said. "This goes for marketing, sales, billing, tech support and customer service."

To drive home the point that customer service is a company-wide effort, Faulkner, 29, sometimes grabs a phone and takes calls from customers himself.

From its birth in Faulkner's dorm room on April 26, 1997, C I Host's core market has been small- and medium-sized companies whose owners and managers were more concerned with running their businesses than becoming techno-geeks. These companies, dubbed "late adopters" in marketing demographics, saw the emerging technology of eCommerce as a tool to boost their bottom lines rather than as an end in itself.

For a year before C I Host was officially formed, Faulkner owned and ran Creative Innovations, a firm that designed web sites for business owners who knew they should have one, but didn't know how to create one. Gradually this handful of original clients asked Faulkner if he could also host the web sites he had created because they weren't happy with their current hosts.

These late-adopters became a source of fascination and success for Faulkner as he perfected ways to give them the cutting edge technology they needed to have a competitive edge in their business while taking the hassle out of understanding the technology and making it work.

"Our motto has always been, 'we hold their hand every step of the way," Faulkner said. "I love the technical stuff, but I know not everyone does. So we take care of all that so our customers can run their company, whether it is a syndicated college radio show or a global conglomerate."

Over the years, C I Host has expanded its reach and now counts among its customers several large companies, who also have their own clients all over the world.

In its early years, C I Host laid the groundwork with strategic alliances that provided clients with hassle-free domain name registration and secure credit card accounts. It was among the first private hosting companies to build redundancy into its network, so that if one segment went down, another segment could quickly become the new route for the data and prevent downtime.

As eCommerce mushroomed, C I Host kept expanding its network and bandwidth capabilities and upgrading the system with such improvements as superior routing technology to avoid Internet congestion points.

"The size and redundancy built into our network mean that C I Host's customers never have to worry about their Web sites going offline," Faulkner said. "Even if one or more of our carriers goes down, our clients' data will be automatically rerouted over backup carriers."

And C I Host's reseller program, launched in 1996 while Faulkner was CEO of Creative Innovations, has developed into one of the most robust, transparent and profitable reseller networks in the industry. More than 8,500 resellers in 25 countries now sell C I Host products and services as their own.

The capstone of C I Host's success - the skill that brings it all together - is its marketing acumen. From putting its name on Evander Holyfield's boxing trunks, to sending a contest winner to the edge of space, to creating the first "human billboard," C I Host has known its market and how to reach it.

Its quirky, fun and attention-getting devices have hit the mark. In the first six months that a 22-year-old man had "C I Host and Managed Web Hosting" tattooed on the back his head, for example, he was responsible for bringing in 500 new customers.

C I Host has packaged its "e-Business in a Box" with a dozen red roses for Valentine's Day, sponsored race cars and drivers, put a 25-foot Santa on the front lawn of its headquarters in Bedford, Texas and sponsored the Web site for a Miss Fort Worth contest.

"It's another way we serve our customers - even before they sign up," Faulkner said. "We have fun with our marketing and invite them to have fun with us. Then we give them the tools to make their businesses fly like a jet or a racecar, be the best, like a boxing champ, or hit just the right chord, like Santa or red roses."

About C I Host
C I Host ( www.cihost.com ), based in the Dallas/Fort Worth market, is a Web hosting and Internet solutions provider, domain name registrar (DNR) and application service provider (ASP) hosting 330,000 domains in 190 countries worldwide.

C I Host creates business-class Web hosting solutions for the small- and medium-enterprise (SME) market, with the broadest portfolio of managed hosting and value-added services in the industry. C I Host is accredited by ICANN to register domain names.

C I Host is HIPAA-compliant and has passed the SAS70 Type I audit.

C I Host has been ranked #1 in speed by the Adoloma Web Hosting Guide. C I Host has been consistently ranked among the Top 5 Web hosting companies out of 16,000 around the globe by c|net's Ultimate Web Host List, HostPulse, WebHostsOnline.com and HostChart.com. C I Host was named among the Top 25 Web hosting companies by HostIndex.com.

C I Host offers turn-key services ranging from initial domain name registration to custom dedicated servers for e-commerce on today's Web. The company offers innovative packages and services to the Internet community.

C I Host operates three diverse data centers across the United States, with its main facility and Network Operations Center in Bedford, Texas. C I Host also has offices in Los Angeles, Chicago and London.

All telco-grade, tier-1 data centers are wholly owned and operated by C I Host and consist of redundant diesel generator backups and a temperature-controlled secure environment with fully redundant UPS capability. All server hardware is fully tested and configured for optimal performance. Daily Web server backups and full fire protection guard against any data loss. To deliver speed and reliability, C I Host's servers are connected to two OC-12 fiber connections, five DS-3 and two OC-3 lines from five diverse Internet backbones for a total of more than 5 Gigabits of available bandwidth.