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Read through our extensive list of Web Host Report Cards. Within each Report Card
you will learn about the people behind the scenes, upcoming products, financial
stability and much more.
Show Web Host Interviews for:
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LFC Hosting Report Card
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Contact Information
Tel:
1-866-532-4678
Email:
sales-general@lfchosting.com
 Website:
http://www.lfchosting.com
Address:
# 31125 RPO Normanview Regina, SK, S4R 8R6, Canada
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Report Card Grade
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LFC Hosting Web Host Interview |
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What is your name and position with LFC Hosting?
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My name is Graham MacCorquodale the Senior Account Executive with LFC Hosting.
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Please tell us the year established and brief history of LFC Hosting?
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Since 1996, Loose Foot Computing Limited (LFC Hosting) has built upon an innovative business model aimed at servicing businesses seeking a web hosting company with lightning fast communication and a solid track record for reliability and security. Since the founding of LFC, the company has grown rapidly and consistently through the provision of optimal web hosting services, allowing businesses to develop and maintain a superior online presence.
Twenty years ago, the Internet was just beginning to be the business tool that it is today, connecting buyers and sellers from across the globe and delivering market-critical information at the click of a finger. Loose Foot’s founder, Rob Sauchyn, President, started by developing an interface that allowed businesses to find a presence on the web. In 1999, Andrew MacCorquodale, Vice-President, and the founder of the successful Rapid World Computer Solutions, merged forces with Sauchyn and doubled the capacity of the team. The two created a menu of services which catered to individual budgets and technical needs, resulting in a market differentiation that allowed the company to grow.
In 2000, the company became the first tenant of the Terrace building in Regina Research Park, Canada, and has since expanded its physical space to allow increased area for the steadily growing data centre. Further expansion saw the addition of 25 employees who were enlisted for the 24/7 on-call support desk to fulfill LFC’s two minute guaranteed response time for support service.
LFC Hosting is currently in its twentieth year of operation, and remains committed to serving the interests of our clients both in North America and internationally.
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What do you offer your customers that are unique to your company?
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LFC Hosting provides a unique, highly affordable, business-oriented approach to web hosting. A complete array of non-standard features and capabilities that competing hosts simply cannot provide, even with their "e-commerce" level plans, are highly accessible and easy to implement for clients of any size, providing them with new possibilities for doing business online.
Our state-of-the-art connection and servers ensure rapid response times and thus no loss of visitors to your web site. Our superior reliability, customer service, network response times, and the many innovative advanced features and developments go beyond a standard Internet presence and have made LFC a leader in the industry.
Your business gains a distinct advantage over your competition by making full use of the many backend capabilities of the Internet. Our all-inclusive approach with unlimited POP3 and IMAP accounts, and essentially everything you will ever need to do business online, allows you room for expansion; there are no hidden fees, so you don''''''''t pay extra as your site grows. This differs from the strategies of most other web hosting companies, who capture clients with a cheap package, then later collect various hidden fees for extra services and sacrifice support and reliability as another means of reducing basic package costs.
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What is the most challenging aspect to offering Web Hosting?
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The most challenging aspect for service oriented hosting companies such as LFC Hosting is also our main strength. Most hosts today concentrate on providing the most web space for the lowest price, even when the average website is still less than 100 MB, while providing unsatisfactory customer service, reliability, and support for back-end (hidden) capabilities, resulting in an endless string of hidden fees with hosting plans that may appear very attractive on the surface.
At LFC Hosting, we focus on providing many more valuable features - features that are typically available only to large companies, at a very affordable cost, making them accessible to businesses of any size through our innovative business and network design. It is these capabilities, together with our all-inclusive approach to hosting, superior customer service (rated #1 by various industry rating sites), reliability, and network response times, that give your business the distinct online advantage over your competition in hosting with LFC.
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What is it that makes LFC Hosting a competitive company in the Web Hosting market?
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LFC’s competitive advantage is in the fact that we provide a unique, highly affordable, business-oriented approach to web hosting with features and capabilities that competing hosts simply cannot provide without charging additional fees.
Our superior reliability, customer service, network response times, and the many innovative advanced features and developments go beyond a standard Internet presence and have made LFC a leader in the industry. Our clients gain a distinct advantage over their competition by making full use of the many backend capabilities of the Internet.
Our all-inclusive approach provides essentially everything needed to do business online and allows room for expansion; there are no hidden fees, so you don''''t pay extra as your site grows.
We are simply able to offer a higher quality of service with many more features, everything needed to conduct secure electronic commerce, at a lower cost overall than competing services.
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What new features have LFC Hosting added for its customers in the past year?
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We have maintained a solid handle on the market, anticipating change and adapting to it quickly. Our corporate structure allows for extreme flexibility and speed of decision-making, a requirement for any IT company to last in today’s marketplace.
LFC has implemented complete daily data backups with a multi-terabyte hard drive backup system. We have multiple sets of drives, rotate them on a weekly basis and store a set off-site in case of a fire or natural disaster.
LFC Hosting uses award winning Retrospect software to provide backup/restore capabilities. This unique software allows us to get a complete snapshot of both our Windows and Linux servers without ever having to stop providing services. As well, utilizing the Disaster Recovery capabilities of the Retrospect software, we have reduced the time it takes to rebuild a server from days down to a little as one hour. This put us among the best in the industry.
We have also extended Retrospects abilities using a custom permission handler, proprietary LFC technology. This allows us to perform much faster restores than with Retrospect alone and ensures that all custom Windows file and ASP.NET permissions are restored perfectly intact (custom permissions can be completely administered through the Control Panel. This advantage is only found with LFC Hosting!
LFC Hosting has migrated its shopping cart solution to Zen Cart, a user-friendly open source shopping cart designed to provide a hassle-free experience for our customers
Clients can now manage their MySQL databases from any browser with this powerful web-based tool, phpMyAdmin, this version also includes the option to configure multiple databases without having to edit files manually.
MS SQL Server Management Studio Express has been added and is a full-featured application to remotely and graphically administer MS SQL Server databases from your own computer.
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What would you say is LFC Hosting #1 asset to its customer base?
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Our people are by far the #1 asset to our clients, and the ability of our clients to access our support staff right through to the President/CEO of the company. Customer service has always been the key factor in the growth of LFC Hosting and even during these times of extreme competition, LFC Hosting continues to enjoy phenomenal growth because of this commitment to it customer service.
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Where do you see LFC Hosting and the web hosting industry in three years?
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Rather than making predictions relating to emerging technologies, I would like to discuss the evolution of web hosting from a business perspective, which has the ultimate effect on the industry as a whole and on the consumer.
Web Hosting at the present time is turning from a highly lucrative industry driven by thousands of three-month old startups willing to say or promise anything or even trade their reputation for more domain name accounts, to an industry driven by the needs of business consumers: quality (that is, service level), dependability, and scalability. This is apparent when going back in time through the host review archives of "find-a-host sites", which, only one year ago, were dominated by horrific reviews of (mainly anonymous) web hosts.
This trend, not unique to the hosting industry, is beginning to result in fewer, larger web hosts governed by customer-driven business morals.
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How many customers do you currently have?
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We currently have in excess of 10,000 clients worldwide
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Do you own your own datacenter?
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We own our equipment and lease space in two Data Centers located in Denver and Montreal.
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Where are they located?
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The LFC Hosting datacenter is located in Denver Colorado with our head office in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Take a tour of our Data Center at http://lfchosting.com/hosting_performance_dctour.shtml
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What kind of back up power do you have?
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Power is drawn from six different city substations, ensuring reliable power. All of LFC''''''''s servers are protected by high-end managed Liebert and APC UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) battery back-up units, which are able to sustain our network for much longer than is needed for the diesel powered back-up generators to activate in the event of an extended power outage.
Industrial PDUs (Power Distribution Units) distribute electricity by converting high voltage current into usable power.
Additionally, all of LFC''''''''s servers are connected through iKVMs and Ethernet Power Controllers, integrated with our sophisticated 24/7 network monitoring system to automatically monitor, control and report the power status of all servers, thereby increasing reliability and uptime through early detection.
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Do you have multiple backbone connections?
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We have two providers right now -- Cogent and Zayo, they are both tier1 backbones. We use BGP with them to provide redundancy.
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What connections do you have?
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LFC operates two parallel Gigabit internal networks with fully redundant, fault-tolerant and load balanced routers and other networking equipment, ensuring unsurpassed speed and reliability. And, live offsite back-up of all customer data is provisioned via a multiple 10GigE line to a sister facility on the other side of the continent, ensuring safe recovery in the event of a fire or natural disaster.
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Do you offer 24/7 support?
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Yes
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Do you have technicians present 24/7 or 9-5 M-F?
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We have support technicians present 24/7 365 days a year which includes unlimited free access to :
24/7 Toll-Free Telephone Support: All calls answered within two minutes - no waiting on hold!
24/7 Live Technical Support Chat: All Live Chat requests answered within two minutes - Guaranteed
24/7 Technical Support Ticket System: All tickets answered within one hour!
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What is your average turn-around time on a support ticket?
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All tickets answered within one hour!
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Do you charge your clients for support? If so, please explain.
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No
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Do you offer a money back guarantee?
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Yes
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