Superb Internet Corp Celebrates 10 Years of Web Hosting

Congratulations on your 10 year anniversary. That is quite an accomplishment. How has web hosting changed since Superb began?

We have been around since the birth of the hosting industry and have been at the forefront of it. We have a unique perspective of how the industry has evolved over the past 10 years. In the early days, most people did not yet grasp the concept of the internet, let alone web hosting. Everything was new and we were pioneers. Due to a rather unique set of skills and industry knowledge we possessed at that time, we had few competitors and our hosting business took off rather rapidly. It also meant educating our clients along the way. Gradually, the success of the hosting industry attracted many players, including many unscrupulous ones. There was a period when these individuals or "companies" tried to lure clients with unsustainable practices just to gain market share. Bankruptcies were common. The hosting industry suffered a down turn parallel to that of the tech industry. Many customers were left stranded while others were left to wonder whether their hosting companies will be in business the next day. Through all this, Superb and our clients managed to forge ahead with clear focus and direction. We even grew during this period of turmoil. One of the positive things that resulted from that difficult period was that many of those pseudo companies have been weeded out. Now, our client base is much more sophisticated and naturally requires the same level of sophistication from us. There are still many of these so called budget web hosts that offer everything including the kitchen sink for mere pennies. The majority of clients have come to recognize that their web sites are too important to risk hosting with these disreputable companies. The industry is at a juncture where if you are not leading the way or you are out of sync with the demand of the clients, you risk being relegated to mediocrity. In this crowded and highly competitive environment, clients have a multitude of choices of web hosts to pick from and it is imperative that we acknowledge and respect this.

I read a lot about Superb growing and expanding. How has exponential growth changed the company?

We have obviously grown bigger, and we service more customers, have more servers, more staff, more traffic, and more data centers and will continue to grow on all of these fronts.

We have never lost track of who we are, and how we got here. Through our success, we have remained the customer-centric organization. The customer always comes first. Our team is made up of quick thinking, incredibly efficient, smart, dedicated people. This has been key for us in a rapidly changing and growing environment. We are at the forefront of the industry when it comes to innovation, and have recognized and quickly acted upon the need to automate processes to increase our efficiency.

Over the next decade we will continue on the same path that we have been on over the last ten years: steady, well-managed growth and fiscal responsibility. We will continue to evolve and grow and keep our customers as our number one priority.

What one quality about Superb helps it distinguish itself from its competitors?

Our relentless pursuit of perfection. No service that we provide is ever "good enough" for us, we always keep improving on our support levels and service quality. We don’t compromise.

We will never be the cheapest but we will always be the best we can be. This is what keeps us “Ahead of the Rest”

Can you give us some insight into any upcoming promotions or new products or services you about to announce?

We are not a company that focuses on flashy gimmicks. Instead, we look "within" us and our services and see how we can improve our customers' experience. To that extent, there are a number of projects that we are working on at this time.

Superb International - a new program listing our accredited resellers, often specializing in providing complimentary services that we do not provide, from all over the world.

We have been always proud of our industry leading customer service, and we have four 24x7 staffed locations (the three data centers + our corporate and support office). We are currently working on some further improvements and new, more strict, support quality metrics that will go live over the summer. The stricter support quality procedures & guidelines will ensure that over 98% of all customer tickets are responded to immediately.

We will be running some fantastic specials over the next few weeks. Check www.superbhosting.net and www.superbservers.net for details.

How do you think problems like spyware, viruses, and SPAM will effect the growth of the internet and web hosting over the next couple of years?

This is a good question. Spyware and viruses rarely affect our daily activities due to the adequate performance of the anti-spyware and anti-virus software. That is not to say that brand new cases of these won't affect us. When and if they do, our team is on top of the situation quickly without significant loss in productivity. We are more concerned about SPAM. E-mail dependency has grown dramatically over the past 10 years, for many it is the only reason they are accessing the internet. Web hosts have traditionally provided e-mail services as part of the hosting package, our success as a webhost is intricately tied to our success as an e-mail service provider. Despite a lot of effort by various organizations and governments through policies and laws, and high profile lawsuits to try and reverse the tide of spam e-mails, we are receiving increasing amount of spam e-mails. We expend extraordinary efforts daily to adjust our anti-spam recipes, training our anti-spam engines to learn spam and non-spam e-mail so that the valuable time of our clients not wasted rummaging through spam e-mail. We have to say as an industry, we are not winning this battle. Spammers are getting more and more insidious. They continually introduce gibberish words and sentences into their spam e-mail, in effect, poisoning our Bayesian statistics so that our anti-spam engines are less able to distinguish spam e-mail from non-spam e-mail. As the internet and web-hosting continue to grow, the e-mail component of it, and the spam problem, if not reversed, will be perhaps the bleakest part of the internet. There are a number of great ideas being discussed and even partially implemented now by some major players to address the e-mail forgery problem and in effect, spam, but no-one seems to agree on which methods are best to use. Consequently, most everyone is waiting to see what standard to use. Sound familiar does it not? The problem is that everyone must be onboard with implementation of one or the other policy for it to be completely effective. Once we set aside our pride and agree on the best solution, there will be hope.

What other factors do you think will significantly impact the hosting world?

This industry changes so fast (e.g. back in 1996 we would not have predicted that by 2006 up to a third of our customers will be game server users), it is hard to accurately predict anything in the mid or far future.

Still greater automation, increased competition on the shared hosting side and the race to zero [price].There is still more growth and further "broadening" of broadband that are sure to affect this industry.

How does Superb thrive in such a competitive business as web hosting? We continue to thrive due to our total dedication to our customers, well-managed growth over the years, and the talent and dedication of our superb staff.

Simply put, it is thanks to our loyal customers and our dedicated staff. Without either of them, we would not exist.

What is the one thing that makes you jump out of bed in the morning?

Every day is a new challenge, that is the beauty of being involved in an industry that changes so quickly. Never a dull moment.

On the other hand, what is the one thing that keeps you up at night?

The many components of this industry that are not within our control yet affect us daily.

What do you see as the largest growth areas in web hosting and how is Superb Internet positioning itself to take advantage of them?

There is a lot more growth to come in all the areas related to hosting - shared hosting, low-cost dedicated, enterprise dedicated, domain registration, etc. As we provide a full array of hosting services, we are in an excellent position to grow in all of these (and other) areas, based on our customers' and market needs.