Ocom

HostReview: How long have you been in the webhosting business?

Con Zwinkels: We now manage more than 11,000 servers and I started with only one in 1997. Many of our clients from those early years still use our services to their full satisfaction.

Together with co-founder and Innovation Director Laurens Rosenthal, I developed LeaseWeb into what it is now. LeaseWeb's tremendous growth is primarily due to our policy of reinvesting our earnings in the expansion and improvement of our Cisco-based hosting network.

Please tell our readers about the latest developments at LeaseWeb.

We've doubled the number of employees at LeaseWeb over the past year. Our network capacity has also doubled and now exceeds 210 Gbps. LeaseWeb's huge network capacity increasingly attracts bulk bandwidth users, including clients who want to use our network for their streaming and live-streaming solutions.

We are currently in the process of substantially expanding our Support Department in order to reduce response times and increase our support availability. Approximately 70 percent of our clients are based in countries outside the Netherlands, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, France, Turkey, Denmark, Poland and Russia. This means that we need to have sufficient support staff available due to the time differences. In addition, more clients increasingly have 24/7 business models with 24/7 service and therefore also expect LeaseWeb to provide 24/7 support.

Another major development at LeaseWeb is the current success of our green proposition. In April of last year, we put into service five-hundred 19-inch racks in the CO2-neutral data center called EvoSwitch, a sister company of LeaseWeb. Our green hosting solutions have turned out to be very successful in the market. We are now considering further expansion of capacity at EvoSwitch in order to further strengthen our position as a supplier of green hosting services.

What sets your service apart from other companies?

We provide quality hosting solutions at very competitive prices. This makes LeaseWeb hosting services attractive to resellers and Internet professionals, among others. LeaseWeb's hosting solutions are also highly scalable. This is reflected in our large network capacity and our enormous amount of excess bandwidth capacity. Our philosophy at LeaseWeb is that we always maintain twice the amount of network capacity that our clients use. The scalability at LeaseWeb is also reflected in the large amount of equipment available on a continuous basis.

What's a client like Starbucks looking for in LeaseWeb hosting?

Starbucks has been a client of LeaseWeb for some time now. Obviously, you would have to ask Starbucks that question in order to find out what needs we meet. I can tell you in general why major clients decide to use LeaseWeb for their hosting needs. Feedback by our clients shows that enterprises consider it to be very important that the continuity of their online presence is guaranteed. Different surveys indicate that the average uptime of LeaseWeb's hosting network is very high, namely 99.999 percent.

The scalability is also important for corporate hosting. Since we maintain twice the network capacity that our clients use in bandwidth, our clients are always assured that they can continue to grow. Enterprise clients also view our large inventories of equipment and components as a plus in terms of scalability.

In addition, our strong relations with A-brand manufacturers such as Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, Dell and Netapp help to ensure that corporate clients receive hosting products that meet their quality requirements.

Many of our clients are surprised at our competitive prices considering the quality of the hosting we provide. We have a good reason for our competitive prices and this has to do with LeaseWeb's market position. We are not a managed-hosting supplier. The provision of complex hosting services is something we prefer to leave to other market players. Our competitive prices make our hosting services attractive to resellers and Internet professionals wanting to market these services jointly with our hosting.

LeaseWeb operates on both sides of the Atlantic. Do you notice any differences in clients and business environments?

I don't really see any differences between our clients in the United States and Europe. People on both sides of the ocean are aware of the growing need to save energy in data centers. Energy consumption is now the biggest expense in data centers and, from a social perspective as well, it only seems logical for us to reduce our energy consumption. LeaseWeb has recognized this need and is therefore building its own data centers with completely green and energy-efficient designs.

What are your ambitions and plans for the future development of LeaseWeb? What obstacles, if any, do you anticipate?

We will continue to improve the quality and expand the size of our hosting network. For this purpose, we recently purchased two Cisco CRS-1 machines that will allow us to design our hosting network in a more hierarchical manner and to eventually achieve a potential capacity of 1900 Gigabits per second, or 1.9 Terabit.

LeaseWeb is also growing very rapidly in both network and business volume, and we are going to continue this strong growth process. Our growth is demonstrated by the fact that last year we rose to No. 18 on the Deloitte Technology Fast 50, the list of the fastest-growing technology companies in the Netherlands. This strong growth is also reflected in our continuing international expansion. We are currently in the process of significantly expanding our physical presence and visibility in several countries in Europe.

The question is whether our organization's organic growth alone will be sufficient to make significant leaps in the U.S. market. Therefore, we are currently considering the possibility of establishing a physical presence in the hosting market in North America in the very near future, either by means of a takeover or by building our own data center. I expect that this will allow us to increase our global market share even faster.

What is your general outlook on hosting market trends? Should we expect any sudden technology or business changes over the coming months and years?

The hosting market is still quite segmented at the moment. I expect some consolidation to take place. Some companies will merge, others will either be taken over or actively start taking over other companies. LeaseWeb has a strong market position in Europe. We are Dell's largest Internet partner, for example. We plan to further strengthen LeaseWeb's leading role in the hosting market.

Please tell us an interesting story from your professional experience – for example, something about an unusual client or technology behaving strangely.

We've had to deal with a rather peculiar form of competition, to say the least. Some competitors simply don't understand how we manage to provide high-quality hosting at such competitive prices. The secret is in our volume and our distinct purchasing policy – an art that not everyone can master. One competitor, instead of competing with us in a fair manner, decided to repeatedly post negative reports about us on hosting blogs. We took the matter to court, and happily were put an end to this unfair form of competition.

Finally, what advice would you give to our readers?

For many companies, and certainly for e-commerce sites, a limited uptime means financial loss or reputation damage. Not everybody knows how to assess a hosting provider's ability to guarantee good uptime.

First of all, you need be aware of the number of telecom carriers the hosting provider uses. Having only one carrier is useless. If that carrier's network has a failure, you as the end client are out of luck. When there are several carriers, you need to know whether they have enough ‘weight' in the respective regions.

Also, the Internet traffic route must be as short as possible since the data must be transmitted to the end client via as few hubs as possible. Providers who rely entirely on their carriers have no control over their data traffic. Hosting providers using Internet exchanges have the ability to control the traffic themselves and thus are better able to guarantee the quality of the routing process. Internet exchanges are also critical for redundancy. If one path fails, there will be plenty of other possibilities left to handle the Internet traffic.

You also need to look at the hosting provider's physical network, including the routers, switches and firewalls. Was the network built using A-brand equipment, and is this equipment up-to-date? And is the size of the hosting network sufficient to withstand DDoS attacks? In case of a serious DDoS attack, a network with a total capacity of 15 Gbps will soon be clogged. And does the provider have sufficient certified staff available to handle Microsoft or Linux problems? Last but not least, if an operating environment is highly dependent on uptime, you will need to make some investments and this includes an effective Service Level Agreement (SLA). 

Name: Con Zwinkels
Age: 35 

Career
1997-present: Managing Director, OCOM Group (www.ocom.com)
The OCOM Group is an international market leader in Internet infrastructure services with leading brands such as LeaseWeb, EvoSwitch and FiberRing. OCOM’s mission is to provide reliable Internet services that allow consumers and companies to realize, maintain and expand their Internet presence. 

Education
1993-1997 Law studies at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands.