1. What is your name and title?
John Killian, President

1. What were the milestones of Simplenet.com from the launch until today?
06/2003   SimpleNet Launches Rebuilt, Revolutionary Shared Hosting Platform
11/2001   SimpleNet Tops 300,000 Total Domain Names
05/2001   SimpleNet Tops 50,000 Hosting Customers and 200,000 Domains
09/2000   SimpleNet Tops 25,000 Shared Hosting Customers
08/1998   SimpleNet Partners with Cobalt to Develop RaQ Appliance
06/1998   Dun and Bradstreet/Entrepreneur Magazines Hot 100 Company Award
03/1998   Completed SimpleNet Data Center in Downtown San Diego
04/1997   SimpleNet Joins Network Solutions as a Domain Registration Partner
06/1997   SimpleNet Partners with MIVA to Provide Scripting Language
03/1996   SimpleNet Launched as the First Internet Presence Provider (IPP)

3. What is your targeted audience?
Our target audience is anyone who has need for a web site, whether for personal or professional use. We have a very good fit with the small to medium-sized businesses that want a presence on the Internet, but may not have the technical staff to host their site within their organizations. This includes those who need a web site, email outsourcing, or Ecommerce.

4. How do you see SimpleNet two years from now?
End-users are going to put more emphasis on reliability. There's no excuse for sites going down anymore. So in the short term it is people hunting for and demanding greater reliability requiring redundant systems like we have at SimpleNet.

Long term we think that the hosting environment will become more of an application-serving environment. The hosting provider will have to provide applications along with their hosting platforms. We believe that eventually everyone will have a web site that acts as a central repository for their information that they can retrieve anytime they wish.

5. What marketing efforts have you taken so far?
At this point, since our re-launch, we've quietly been marketing through several channels on the Internet to determine which are going to work for us. That research has included the purchase of banners, sponsorships, PPC engines, and a diligent effort to locate many of the former 'yourname.simplenet.com' customers whose third-level URLs are still generating traffic from being indexed in the directories.

6. Why should a site owner choose Simplenet.com over another hosting company?
There are two aspects that differentiate us reliability and support. Operating our own data center and building multiple hosting platforms over the years have given us a ton of experience not only in how to operate a hosting company, but also in how to deal with issues quicker than most of the industry. There aren't too many things that we haven't seen, so were pretty solid in the category of reliability and response.

Our engineers were some of the first to create web hosting as an industry. We've built a fully redundant web hosting architecture and all of our shared hosting products live on it, from our $4.99/month accounts on up to our Ecommerce accounts.

When we say redundancy we mean multiple web servers, multiple email servers in a fully load-balanced environment, disk storage with hot spare drives, multiple Internet providers, multiple fiber providers, multiple air conditioning units, UPS, and our own gas-powered generator. This is reliability and redundancy to the nth degree.

Secondarily, we also differentiate ourselves from many other hosts by providing top-of-the-line customer support. Our Representatives are available 24 hours per day, for all accounts we offer. Each Customer Support Representative has had at least four years of experience in support of web hosting customers. We're dedicated to solving our customers' problems even if it means talking them through a process that's not necessarily our responsibility. If were knowledgeable about the topic, we'll try to help our customers.

We've been on the Internet for a long time, and we understand the Internet but we also know that a lot of people out there aren't that comfortable with it. They want to have a web page, but there's a complex language that goes with it and small technology hurdles and not everybody is comfortable with that. We understand that, and we want to help people.

7. What advice do you have for someone who is just starting his hosting company?
Advice? For a competitor? (chuckling) Make sure that your company's servers are located in a facility such as SimpleNet's. Customers are precious – listen to them, handle with care, and they will become your non-compensated salesforce. Cast them aside and watch your company fail. Make your products work and then launch them, don't launch and fix them later.

8. How different is the market today from what it was a year ago?
We are coming to the end of another consolidation phase in the web hosting industry. Every couple of years, customer expectations for reliability, support, and technology increase. Several of the smaller companies may struggle with those advances and we then see consolidation.

Please feel free to view our shared hosting plans or contact SimpleNet by calling toll-free, 1-888-243-3225.