Web Hosting Interview - LCN September 2009

MARK BOOST: As Managing Director I oversee the general day to day running of the company. I have a particular interest in the marketing and product development areas of the business and am hugely passionate about providing "5 Star" customer service (as we call it internally).

My first career and passion was Motorsport. I started Karting at 15 and by 17 I was 2nd in the British Kart Championship. I then progressed through various levels of Motorsport reaching Formula 3, before running out of sponsorship to continue my motorsport career, effectively ending my ultimate aim of reaching Formula 1.

As my motorsport career came to an abrupt end, I needed a new challenge. I always had a passion for IT and business, and decided to start my own business in November 1999. My initial focus was web design services, however I saw a gap in the market to provide low cost domain name registration and affordable web hosting services. Initially this was set-up as LowCostNames.com and has since been rebranded to the more familiar LCN.com.

MARK BOOST: In 2003 we decided to launch Telivo.com, which essentially offered the same services as LCN, but gave us an opportunity of a 2nd brand with a slightly different marketing focus. Telivo grew very quickly and in terms of purely domain numbers, it quickly outgrew LCN.

Due to the success of both brands, we decided that the man hours required to operate each brand independently going forward was becoming too great and very inefficient. Particularly from a marketing point of view, as double the amount of work was required to promote each brand. We therefore decided to merge the brands into one (LCN.com) and focus all of our efforts on the new larger brand.

MARK BOOST: The LCN.com website and our LCN hosting packages have been built on a completely different platform to that of Telivo.com. This has been recently updated and offers many advantages for the incoming Telivo customers. The LCN systems certainly offer a broader range of products and a much improved management interface. We are also able to offer more flexibility on pricing, including discounts for multi-year purchases, bulk buyers and regular promotions. There are many other advantages too, I could go on and on…but you'd probably get bored!

MARK BOOST: Our Dynamic Hosting package is without doubt our best selling product. It offers the majority of features that customers require and is priced at level which is very affordable. It also comes with free award winning web design software from Serif.

MARK BOOST: The goal of our business is to provide a suite of hosting solutions to cater for the majority of customers requirements. There is always going to be customers where our solutions don't provide exactly what they need, as there are so many different technologies out there. However, we aim to create an array of feature rich and flexible hosting solutions that will meet the vast majority of customers' needs.

MARK BOOST: Although our head offices are based in the UK, we have already established offices in the US and provide US phone support too. We also work extremely hard to gather feedback from our customers and the feedback received so far from US based customers has been very positive.

MARK BOOST: We haven't been affected by the current economic climate and have actually improved our year on year sales. However, we're always acutely aware of the current economic situation and how quickly things can sometimes change. For that reason we never take anything for granted and are making sure we work even harder during this period of economic decline.

MARK BOOST: We have some very exciting new products being launched over the next 12 months, which I can't say too much about at this point. I believe that over the next few years these will help establish ourselves further as one of the leading brands not only in the UK, but globally also.