Interviewed on 3 Feb 05
Martin Leclair, VP & COO
My name is Martin Leclair. I am the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of iWeb Technologies Inc. Among the top 30 Canadian web hosts, iWeb offers a wide range of hosting services to answer both individual and corporate needs.
iWeb Technologies was founded in 1996. In 1998, iWeb focused its business efforts on Web hosting and server management and became a reference in the French language Web hosting market. iWeb then expanded its offers to English and Spanish speaking customers.
In April 2004, in addition to entering the stock market (TSX:IWB), iWeb acquired a 10,000 square foot building that now shelters its new datacenter and operation center.
In over eight years, iWeb Technologies has acquired solid knowledge of the Internet and its experience is at your disposition. Its proposition : to combine a high-tech datacenter, unsurpassed technical support with a stable, quality, web hosting framework for your applications and Internet creations.
What unique selling points do you offer?
We are Canadian, while most of the big web hosting players are from the USA and we are offer hosting in the United States. We also operate our own datacenter while a lot of web hosting competitors are resellers or are operating servers located in a datacenter owned by a third party.
We concentrate our efforts on the dedicated server side of the web hosting industry, dedicated server hosting is a very competitive market and we need to work hard to always stay at the top and make our offers stand out from our competitors.
We hold our technicians and specialists in high regard and work hard at choosing the right person for each position. Each employee is seen as an ambassador – it’s important to choose only the best.
Describe the services you offer?
Three words define Web Hosting : Network, Datacenter and Servers. Files are hosted on one or multiple servers physically located in a datacenter and available worldwide through the network. iWeb adds security, fiability and high availability to the definition.
Describe your target market?
iWeb.Ca defines itself as the Canadian Alternative, our target market is clearly Canadian individuals and businesses looking for web hosting. That doesn't mean that customers from other countries can't take advantage of our offers, we have clients in over 42 different countries!
How is your company planning for the future?
iWeb will most likely position itself as the leading Canadian hosting services provider. We are also very optimistic that, in the near future, several other locations with datacenters and even more important hosting capabilities will be up and running.
What benefits can you offer your customers?
We care for our customers, we are flexible and available, our offers compete with any other provider. And beside the other advantages stated while answering the previous questions, we signed several partnership deals with control panel software companies (cpanel, Plesk, Ensim, Helm), w e also raised traffic allocation of dedicated servers multiple times, up to 2,000 GB. In the near future, 10 Mbps unmetered service will be added. Finally, we added RAID configuration options to the servers and we are now offering servers that include SATA hard drives. Those are also some advantages of choosing iWeb.Ca.
How do you support your customers?
Support is unlimited with shared hosting. Dedicated hosting and Colocation include an unlimited hardware and network issues support and a limited software issues support. We also offer multiple management packages with backups, 24/7 monitoring of individual servers, security updates, resources monitoring and a lot more. We offer our clients a 24/7 emergency phone number, we answer tickets quickly and we offer a 4 hours hardware replacement guarantee. Furthermore, our team is friendly, attentive and highly competent.
