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Interview with Christopher Faulkner CEO, C I Host By Staff Writer 1) C I Host has been working to build two new data centers in Chicago and Los Angeles to complement your existing facility in Texas. Are these centers strictly to support your growing client base or do they symbolize a strategy change to being a broader infrastructure provider? Faulkner: These centers have two purposes: to allow us to expand our portfolio of offerings, and to strengthen our network infrastructure. These new facilities will allow C I Host to offer geographic load balancing, geographic fault tolerance, geographic content distribution, and new points of presence (POPs) for our co location clients.  C I Host has always been the provider of choice for small to medium-sized businesses. With our new broader infrastructure backed by our new data centers, we will present large corporate clients with a versatile array of services offered by no other virtual Web-hosting provider. We will finally have the all encompassing portfolio that will appeal to any business, small, medium, or large! We are dedicating half of our new data centers strictly for co-location customers. This will allow our clients to house their own equipment in multiple locations and to take advantage of our geographic content distribution and load balancing services using their own hardware. 2) C I Host announced a 20-minute UNIX server setup time. How is C I Host able to supply this to customers? Does such a fast setup impact the quality of the server or depth of software implementation that a customer might receive? Faulkner: C I Host is built upon the philosophy that quality and high levels of customer service are the key factors to running a successful business. Quality is our number-one focus at C I Host. For five years C I Host has been perfecting the setup process of our virtual hosting accounts. When we started, it took roughly 20 minutes to set up one UNIX domain and install all of our preinstalled scripts, databases, and programs into the new account.  Today, using automation and proprietary configuration software, it takes less than 30 seconds from the time the client submits the order to the time the client receives the welcome package via e mail.  We are taking this timesaving methodology and using it to revamp our dedicated server operations. Because we sell a tremendous number of dedicated servers each week, all of our machines are prebuilt, tested, and waiting on our racks. When an order for a server comes in, we simply charge the client's credit card and pass on the configuration information to ServerMonster, which sets up that client's new box within four minutes and sends out the logins to the new machine. These servers are configured the same way as we have always done it. Now, however, instead of starting the process after an order comes in, we start it days before. 3) How have C I Host's stability issues been addressed recently? What steps have you taken to ensure the maximum possible uptime for your users? Faulkner:  I am going to answer this question in five parts. First, we have tested new hardware configurations for all of our shared and dedicated servers to find out which hardware specifications will best support our users.  Thanks to this research, we are now able to combine top-quality hardware that best suits our clients' specific needs. We have upgraded all of our shared server hardware to handle the ever-increasing demands of today's Web hosting client. We now run every client on a Dual Pentium III 850 Mhz machine with 1 GB of RAM each. We now use SCSI hard disks for faster read/write performance and have installed state-of-the art cooling devices in each machine to prevent hard disk failure stemming from overheated processors and drives. Second, to ensure that our clients get superlative technical support, we staff our data centers 24/7 with trained NT and UNIX administrators. Most Web hosts just leave nighttime "technicians" on duty to reboot machines when necessary. Trouble can strike any time, day or night. At C I Host we are prepared. Our administrators monitor all Web sites and are alerted immediately should an issue appear.  Because they are on-site, they can quickly fix the issue and get sites back up to 100% performance within minutes or seconds. Third, we have increased the number of high-speed Internet connections coming into our network. We have added additional DS-3 connections from Sprint and Saavis, and we will be upgrading our Qwest connection to full-blown OC-3 within 15 days.  This will give C I Host one of the fastest and largest private networks dedicated exclusively to Web hosting in the world. Fourth, our entire network infrastructure is completely redundant. Our network will have over 450 MBits of available bandwidth. If any of our connections go down, the others can easily run the traffic until we can bring the other fiber back online. Our climate-controlled facilities are backed up by a 100-ton chiller that is used strictly as a backup resource. Our building power comes from two distinct power sources and grids. Our routers have backup units set in lateral positions so that live-spares are waiting to route traffic if our core or border routers go down. Our Web servers are built with two network cards in place--if the main card fails, the machine will not lose connectivity to the Internet. The Web servers also have redundant power supplies and hot-swap hard disks.  Our research and development department takes proactive measures to ensure we have suitable workarounds for every possible point of failure within our network. Fifth, by opening new data centers in Los Angeles and Chicago, we will offer even more reliability by allowing our clients to mirror their Web site content across all three data centers. We can thus remove the single point of failure common to Web hosting companies operating from one location.  The content will be automatically mirrored from the other backup data centers until our main center is 100% operational again.  With this new feature, our clients' Web sites will never go down, even if there is a fiber-cut in the Midwest or a power loss in Texas. No other Web hosting company offers this set of services to their shared clients.  We also house off-site nameservers at both of our new data centers. This ensures that if our name server set in Texas has any kind of problems, ns3 and ns4 housed in Chicago and Los Angeles will continue to serve name resolution until any issue in Texas is resolved. As you can see, we have taken every possible step to ensure that our clients' uptime is recorded as the highest rating in the industry. <%getBannerByGroup("bottom_main")%> 4) Your company has also developed an automatic Web site development tool for both clients and nonclients to use (sitemonster.cihost.com). How has this complementary development system been received by Web masters? Are there any plans to expand it beyond current functionality? Faulkner: Largely due to traffic sent by HostIndex.com, SiteMonster has become a tremendous success. Over 15,000 people have used SiteMonster since it was launched in May 2000.  Seasoned Web masters and first-time Internet users have raved about the functionality and customization available to them in SiteMonster. Most template-driven site producers have very little customization features. By comparison, C I Host's SiteMonster software lets you completely rearrange the templates by placing your images anywhere on the page you want. It even has its own built-in image designer, ImageMonster, that works like a LE version of PhotoShop and lets you create custom graphics, buttons, banners and logos, all within SiteMonster.  Once your site is complete, you can FTP it to any domain on any network or use the nonvirtual domain SiteMonster assigns to you. We believe SiteMonster's success is attributed to its flexibility, customization ability, and easy navigation system. SiteMonster v2.0 is slated for release in the first quarter of 2001. It will contain new state of-the-art features like ShopMonster, which walks you through the setup of your free, custom-designed shopping cart and adds a complete e-business system to your site. It will also include 400 new templates, 1,000 new prebuilt images to use in your designs, and new CGI-scripts, among them a complete banner advertising system, visitor guestbooks, chat systems, voting booths, and survey systems that can be integrated into your SiteMonster design. Finally, the new release includes the option to turn on headers and footers so you can add common elements to all pages and dynamically change them on the fly. Users can automatically create "previous" and "next" page links and site maps with the new MonsterConfiguration menu. 5) In growing into one of the larger hosting companies, C I Host must need significant personnel. How many of your employees serve customers? How do you ensure that clients always have top-notch support and service representatives? Faulkner: C I Host prides itself in having one of the top technical support and customer- care team in the industry.  We have achieved this level of excellence through the foundation that our call center is built upon – low client-to-support representative ratio, formal and continued training, and feedback from our customers. Over the past five years, we have made countless client surveys, studied data taken from our call center, and charted our growth to determine the proper ratio of support representatives to clients. We never want our clients to wait more than five minutes on hold. By keeping our client-to-support representative ratio low, we field more calls in a shorter amount of time. Next, formal and continuous education is the key to customer care. We want our clients to get the answers and help they need to run a successful business. We have a full scale training center that instructs our new hires and conducts our continued education classes. All of our employees must attend 20 hours of continued education each quarter. Finally, C I Host is the first Web hosting provider to launch a dedicated quality assurance department aimed at taking our customer care to the next level. Our quality assurance team randomly calls customers back to survey them on their experience with our staff members. The team compiles customer feedback and addresses each issue straight to resolution. This proactive step ensures that our customers stay happy and that their feedback is used in a positive manner. 6) Can you give us a preview of any upcoming announcements by your company or future areas of service focus that you intend to emphasize? Faulkner: C I Host has long been the price and feature leader in the virtual hosting business. During 2001 C I Host plans to aggressively market our dedicated server and co-location offering. We also plan to attack the medium-to-large corporate market with our new portfolio of high-end solutions, including geographic load balancing, fault tolerance, and content distribution.  By May 2001, we plan to open data centers in London and Japan, thus enabling us to offer global distribution, tolerance, and mirroring of data.  By lighting dark-fiber between these new data centers, C I Host is on target to launch our own private backbone that allows instantaneous mirroring of content all over the world.  C I Host has just become the first virtual Web host to offer static content caching through an exclusive partnership with EpicRealm. Our strategic alliance with EpicRealm will enable us to offer our clients static content caching. EpicRealm has 60 POPs throughout the world, allowing our clients' sites to be cached in all 60 of their locations. This will greatly speed up e business and SSL transactions, shaving one to two seconds off the reply time to an overseas request. We want to make sure C I Host stays at the forefront of the technology race by offering our clients the latest and greatest features in the industry. Thank you for the opportunity to conduct this interview. I wish HostIndex.com great success in the future. Read a previous interview with Christopher Faulkner