HostReview talks with Con Zwinkels, Managing Director of LeaseWeb, about green datacenters, customer advice, and more

HostReview: How long have you been in the webhosting business?

Con Zwinkels:We now manage more than 11,000 servers and I started with only one in 1997. Many of our clients from those early years still use our services to their full satisfaction.

Name: Con Zwinkels
Age: 35

Career
1997-present: Managing Director, OCOM Group (www.ocom.com)
The OCOM Group is an international market leader in Internet infrastructure services with leading brands such as LeaseWeb, EvoSwitch and FiberRing. OCOM’s mission is to provide reliable Internet services that allow consumers and companies to realize, maintain and expand their Internet presence.

Education
1993-1997 Law studies at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Together with co-founder and Innovation Director Laurens Rosenthal, I developed LeaseWeb into what it is now. LeaseWeb's tremendous growth is primarily due to our policy of reinvesting our earnings in the expansion and improvement of our Cisco-based hosting network.

Please tell our readers about the latest developments at LeaseWeb.

We've doubled the number of employees at LeaseWeb over the past year. Our network capacity has also doubled and now exceeds 210 Gbps. LeaseWeb's huge network capacity increasingly attracts bulk bandwidth users, including clients who want to use our network for their streaming and live-streaming solutions.

We are currently in the process of substantially expanding our Support Department in order to reduce response times and increase our support availability. Approximately 70 percent of our clients are based in countries outside the Netherlands, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, France, Turkey, Denmark, Poland and Russia. This means that we need to have sufficient support staff available due to the time differences. In addition, more clients increasingly have 24/7 business models with 24/7 service and therefore also expect LeaseWeb to provide 24/7 support.

Another major development at LeaseWeb is the current success of our green proposition. In April of last year, we put into service five-hundred 19-inch racks in the CO2-neutral data center called EvoSwitch, a sister company of LeaseWeb. Our green hosting solutions have turned out to be very successful in the market. We are now considering further expansion of capacity at EvoSwitch in order to further strengthen our position as a supplier of green hosting services.

What sets your service apart from other companies?

We provide quality hosting solutions at very competitive prices. This makes LeaseWeb hosting services attractive to resellers and Internet professionals, among others. LeaseWeb's hosting solutions are also highly scalable. This is reflected in our large network capacity and our enormous amount of excess bandwidth capacity. Our philosophy at LeaseWeb is that we always maintain twice the amount of network capacity that our clients use. The scalability at LeaseWeb is also reflected in the large amount of equipment available on a continuous basis.

What's a client like Starbucks looking for in LeaseWeb hosting?

Starbucks has been a client of LeaseWeb for some time now. Obviously, you would have to ask Starbucks that question in order to find out what needs we meet. I can tell you in general why major clients decide to use LeaseWeb for their hosting needs. Feedback by our clients shows that enterprises consider it to be very important that the continuity of their online presence is guaranteed. Different surveys indicate that the average uptime of LeaseWeb's hosting network is very high, namely 99.999 percent.

The scalability is also important for corporate hosting. Since we maintain twice the network capacity that our clients use in bandwidth, our clients are always assured that they can continue to grow. Enterprise clients also view our large inventories of equipment and components as a plus in terms of scalability.

In addition, our strong relations with A-brand manufacturers such as Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, Dell and Netapp help to ensure that corporate clients receive hosting products that meet their quality requirements.

Many of our clients are surprised at our competitive prices considering the quality of the hosting we provide. We have a good reason for our competitive prices and this has to do with LeaseWeb's market position. We are not a managed-hosting supplier. The provision of complex hosting services is something we prefer to leave to other market players. Our competitive prices make our hosting services attractive to resellers and Internet professionals wanting to market these services jointly with our hosting.

LeaseWeb operates on both sides of the Atlantic. Do you notice any differences in clients and business environments?

I don't really see any differences between our clients in the United States and Europe. People on both sides of the ocean are aware of the growing need to save energy in data centers. Energy consumption is now the biggest expense in data centers and, from a social perspective as well, it only seems logical for us to reduce our energy consumption. LeaseWeb has recognized this need and is therefore building its own data centers with completely green and energy-efficient designs.