HostIndex.com Interview with Fathi Said An exclusive conversation with Fathi Said, CEO of IX Web Hosting, Hopkinsville, KY HostIndex.com recently sat down with Fathi Said, CEO & Founder of successful web hosting company - IX Web Hosting - to talk about how he sees his corporation continuing to serve the individual and SME hosting marketplaces: What web hosting segment does IX Web Hosting primarily serve and how do you feel IX Web Hosting achieves success within this product category? For several years, IX Web Hosting has provided premium hosting services specifically to personal sites or to small and medium businesses. I credit our success to our unique ability to offer a large variety of premium services and features at an affordable price that everyone can afford. Success is a relative term, but I believe we're doing something right with the nearly 250,000 websites we currently host. What advantages or disadvantages does IX Web Hosting experience as a result of being based in Kentucky? Ah yes, Kentucky. It's really quite an interesting place to operate a technology company from, and it's certainly been an experience for us. I see the main advantage Kentucky has provided us with is the people. With our Technical Help Desk services based here, customers who call in are assured to have a very pleasant experience, greeted by a welcoming southern voice and likewise hospitality. I really believe our customers appreciate this. Sadly though, it has been somewhat of a headache. Kentucky is not known as a technology state, and growing without access to competition between bandwidth providers make it expensive to operate for us. We've managed so far and we're always looking for new ways to make it better. IX Web Hosting offers significant account features, both in terms of web space and bandwidth, at a relatively inexpensive price point. Indeed, the web hosting industry has truly started to deliver large quantities of web space and bandwidth to hosting customers during 2007 without price increases. How are hosting buyers benefiting from these increasing account allowances and where do you see this trend going? The web is continually changing. Ten years ago, most hosting services were ten times as expensive and offered maybe ten megabytes of storage space and transfer allowance. Back then, that was sufficient for most sites which were limited to a few small images and some text files. Today's Internet is vastly different. Sites are growing more and more complex, with integrated audio and video, flash animations, etc. Multimedia-rich sites are a must for successful sites these days and accordingly they need more space and features. To remain competitive and to provide our customers with what they need, IX Web Hosting has increased certain features such as disk space and transfer quotas to ultra-high or nearly unlimited levels. If it's what our customers need and want, we'll give it to them without hesitation. The end result is our customers are happy, and we're happy - it's a win-win situation. IX Web Hosting does not currently provide dedicated server or VPS hosting options. Will IX Web Hosting be delivering these hosting categories at some point in the future? Dedicated services are an entirely different animal. Most individual users or small business do not require the need of dedicated services. Because these have been our target markets in recent years, we haven't felt the need to develop and deploy such services. However, times are changing and we've began looking into the possibility of offering dedicated servers for larger businesses, off site storage and data recovery, etc. In fact, we're currently preparing to build a new data facility which will most likely include capacity for dedicated services products. Can you explain IX Web Hosting's Uptime or Cash Guarantee? How important is uptime in the shared hosting marketplace and how do you manage servers so as to ensure that their usage load does not cause server outages? Customers put their trust in us, and we feel the best way to gain that trust is to guarantee them that their sites will be up and working. Although no technology is perfect, we have taken extensive measures and expenses to provide a very stable hosting platform, monitored by a full 24/7/365 staff and an array of tools and equipment. We're very serious about what we do and because of the confidence we have in ourselves and our services, we're more than willing to offer customers hassle free guarantees for their services. Customers expect reliable services and we're eager to please by offering them those services and a safety-net of added money-back guarantees to assure it. If a customer is dissatisfied with our services or if the services are not stable or down, we will gladly offer full refunds. Customers have nothing to lose! What are the largest recurring challenges you face with respect to being a CEO in the competitive web hosting industry? Constant change. Although most changes are for the better, the Internet changes so often, you must constantly be striving for improvement, or else you'll fall behind. Competition is very stiff and as new technologies and features are rolled out, you need to stay on top of things and ensure your company is operating efficiently enough to create and deploy new services around the clock. What are the two key reasons why an individual or business needing a web host should choose IX Web Hosting over another provider? We have a proven track record of outstanding customer service, a wide selection of products with excellent features and affordable prices. Customers respond well to our rock solid services and it shows. In just 4 years, we've added over 200,000 web sites to our service platform. This splendid level of growth has given us great success and the resources and ability to grow internally to increase quality assurance and product features; all for the benefit of customers. This makes IX Web Hosting a unique hosting provider and an excellent choice for customers. Thank you. This interview was conducted in the Summer of 2007. Readers can visit IX Web Hosting by clicking here.