Hostway Announces 100,000th Hosted Web Site

Customer Centric Hosting Services Still in High Demand

Chicago—June 3, 2002—Hostway Corporation, a Chicago-based provider of Web hosting services and online business tools for small- to medium-sized enterprises, announces it has recently surpassed the 100,000 mark in hosted Web sites. Hostway's customer base has grown 100 percent year-over-year. This impressive customer acquisition rate has helped Hostway double its revenue this year.

Hostway's focus on customer service has been the key driver in its growth. With more than one-third of its new customers coming from customer referrals, small- and medium-sized businesses are clearly responding to Hostway's attention to customer needs. To ensure customer service keeps up with its rapid growth, Hostway has been expanding its employee headcount and continues to hire.

Additionally, Hostway invests heavily in research and development to automate many of the internal processes and self-help tools that empower customers to solve problems without having to contact a support team member. Recently, Hostway released the version 3.0 of SiteControl, a Hostway developed web-based control panel that puts the control of the Web site at customers' fingertips anytime and anywhere they have access to the Internet. The latest version of SiteControl is more powerful and remains one of the most customer-friendly control panels on the market.

"Hostway's growth is the result of its industry leading value and strong understanding of the needs of small- and medium-sized businesses," said John Lee, director of marketing for Hostway. "Hostway has doubled its revenue every year since its inception-by continuing to focus on the customer, and deliver a reliable and low-cost solution, we expect Hostway's growth pattern to continue."

"The market for shared and low-end dedicated hosting has become increasingly commoditized, resulting in quality customer service becoming a key differentiator among hosting providers," says Joshua Beil, vice president of research and development at Tier 1 Research. "The notion of delivering customer service extends beyond just sales and technical support-good customer service also has a lot to do with the types of tools and resources that are made available to customers to manage their Web sites and their service contracts."

Hostway is consistently recognized as a leading Web hosting provider by online hosting resources. HostIndex.com ranked Hostway as the number one hosting provider in 1999, 2000 and 2001. Hostway was also ranked as a "Top 3 Web hosting Provider" by both TopHost.com and AceHost.com in 2001. For the last three years, Hostway has been listed one of the "Top 3 Most Popular Web hosting Providers" by CNet.