ICDSOFT

A vastly-used method to popularize and sell a hosting service is to have your company listed on hosting review and rating sites.

ICDSoft is in the hosting business for more than 12 years. Back in 2002, we were hosting about 10,000 sites, growing up to over 100,000 in 2011. Despite of the fact that we have quite many customers, you can notice that ICDSoft is not listed on many hosting rating sites.

In general, there are two types of hosting rating sites:

• sites that list all companies they can find, and then collect and display each review of hosting customers. Such sites make a living usually by selling space for advertising, or by affiliate programs.
• sites that offer paid listings - hosting companies pay for their place in the countdown just as advertising space is paid. The higher is the ranking place - the higher is the fee for it.

If you see ICDSoft listed in a hosting reviews and rating site, then the site is from the first type. You can be absolutely sure about this, because we do not invest any money in such type of marketing. So if you see our name on a list, then this definitely is not a paid listing.

Our marketing budget has always been close to zero. The reason for this is quite simple - instead of spending money on marketing, we prefer to spend money for improving our hosting services. This includes purchasing expensive hardware, using reliable colo services, and hiring knowledgeable staff. The lack of marketing budget allows us to offer a high quality hosting service at relatively low prices. These prices would have been much higher at a company that is on all paid hosting listings. Actually, we have more "marketing agents" than any other company - when a customer satisfied with the high level of our services recommends us, this pays better than any advertisement or paid listing.

We plan to continue doing our business in the same manner.

Today we doubled the space and traffic resources of all Business plan accounts on our servers. The Business plan now features:

• Disk space: 100GB (50GB until now)
• Monthly traffic: 1000GB (500GB until now)

The plan price and volume discounts remain the same. With this upgrade, we want to give our customers more room to develop and expand their websites and online presence.

This plan upgrade became possible after the improvements we recently made to our servers and network infrastructure. All our several hundred hosting machines were replaced with the latest hardware available on the market. We also upgraded and fine-tuned all network equipment within the datacenters, thus allowing faster access speed to our servers. We were able to make serious investments in our infrastructure as a result of the loyalty of our customers who have used our services for years. We feel obliged to continue providing the best possible service to all our customers.

As of today, we are extending the range of services we offer, and we now provide domain validation SSL certificates as well. Our customers can choose between GeoTrust and Comodo as a certificate issuer. We hope that providing SSL certificates will make site/account administration easier for our customers, being able to use more services for their sites at a single provider.

For the last several months, we were conducting a campaign to switch the default PHP interpreter on our servers to PHP 5.3. This has been quite a challenging task, given the incompatibilities between PHP 5.2 and 5.3, and our goal to perform such updates without affecting customer sites. The campaign is complete, and now all our servers run PHP 5.3 as default PHP interpreter, while PHP 5.2 is still available.

We will continue our efforts to provide to our customers the most recent technologies available, without compromising the stability and security of our service. Also, we will continue to enforce a policy that any such upgrades should have minimal impact on customer services.

For the past months, our engineers were working on a substantial upgrade of the disk systems on our servers. As of today, besides the RAID6 disk array, all our servers have solid state disks (SSD) as well. The I/O operations are balanced between the SSD and the RAID array, and most intensive operations run on the SSD. This significantly improves the overall system performance, and we believe that this brings the level of our hosting services even higher.