Hostica: Leveraging Two Decades of Experience to Deliver High-Quality, Scalable Hosting Via Renewable Energy Sources

TL; DR: During its two decades in the hosting business, Hostica has earned a reputation for high performance, value, and hands-on support. The customer-centric family business offers a range of configurable shared, virtual, and dedicated packages powered by renewable energy. With plans for enhanced reseller offerings in the works, Hostica is poised to meet the needs of new generations of customers for years to come. //

Consumers who seek out hosting solutions don’t typically expect to receive any warm fuzzies from a highly technical market. But Hostica is changing those perceptions.

The family-owned business was founded by President and CEO Jay Jeszenka, who works closely with his son, Systems Administrator Michael Jeszenka, to further their personal commitment to customers. During the past two decades, the company has earned a well-deserved reputation for welcoming customers into the Hostica family through wholehearted attention and support.

Hostica is also acting in service of future generations of customers by running all servers on 100% green energy from renewable sources. “We are proud that our web hosting service will not have a negative impact on the environment,” Jay said.

The company entered the hosting market in 1999 and has remained nimble ever since. “We’re small, but we’re very flexible, and that’s what makes our company so great,” Jay said. “We can make decisions and implement systemwide changes within hours, whenever we need to.”

Today, Hostica provides shared, virtual, and dedicated servers plus reseller solutions for individuals, families, and SMBs looking for a high-performance, environmentally friendly service backed by exceptional customer support. Customers can also transfer and register domains, take control of their inboxes through email services, and take advantage of security solutions through SiteLock.

The customer-centric family business is always happy to customize its hosting solutions based on individual need, and offers 24/7 support for help with everything from hosting-related issues and control panel guidance to domain registration. With plans for enhanced reseller offerings in the works, Hostica is poised to help new generations of customers maintain an online presence for years to come.

After 20 years in the rapidly evolving hosting business, Jay said he’s seen it all. “I wake up every morning wondering what’s going to be different today,” he said. He remembers when email became ubiquitous, he’s watched personal websites fade away in favor of social media profiles, and he’s witnessed soaring demand for commercially oriented sites backed by robust security systems.

Along the way, Hostica’s main objective has been to keep its SMB customers up-to-date with the latest green technology while providing dedicated customer service. To that end, Jay would rather forgo a marketing budget to provide high-quality resources and support to his customers — even if it means the company remains the internet’s best-kept secret. At Hostica, customers will never be passed off to outsourced call centers.

“Because of the small size of our operation, our customer base is also modest, but it has been fairly consistent over the years,” Michael said. “As a result, we have a strong working relationship with a lot of our customers, who we know on a first-name basis. Knowing who they are and what issues they typically experience helps us find resolutions more quickly. And that makes our customers happier.”

Hostica works with a range of small- and medium-sized businesses, including real estate agents, lawyers, and mom-and-pop shops. Jay said he’s especially proud to work with environmentally conscious schools and universities who sign up with the company to host classroom projects. “I really like to see young people who are learning and building websites come into our industry,” he said.

Jay told us that Hostica’s focus on support and sustainable hosting solutions doesn’t take away from its passion for robust technology. “Technology changes very rapidly, and it’s our job to keep up with it,” he said.

For example, all of the company’s web hosting packages come with LiteSpeed’s secure, high-performance web server software, which is said to be up to nine times faster than Apache. All web hosting accounts also feature user-friendly server management through the ever-popular cPanel, free SSL certificates, and free automated backups through R1Soft. Finally, to ensure fast and reliable service, Hostica invests solely in SSDs.

“As far as our hard drives go, we pay extra for SSDs to ensure we’re offering our customers the best service that we can possibly provide,” Michael said. “We hope if customers bounce around between hosts and find a provider that’s cheaper than us, they’ll be able to notice a difference in the services we offer. It’s sometimes hard to prove that to people, but it’s something that I know, on our end, is going on, and I’m proud of that.”

That said, the company’s goal is to keep prices as competitive as possible, providing a high level of support and quality services but never overselling web hosting services. To ensure customers can sign up with confidence, Hostica offers a 30-day money-back guarantee for all web hosting services.

But, at the end of the day, Michael said Hostica’s two decades of experience speak for themselves. “We’ve been in the game since the late ’90s,” he said. “We’re not a fly-by-night company — we’ve been around, and we’re not going anywhere. We are fully prepared for any challenges that might come our way.”

In terms of ongoing development, Hostica relies mainly on customer feedback and is never afraid to create custom solutions for individual clients. “We’ve had many instances where customers would have a special need, and we actually tailor our hosting package for them specifically,” Michael said. “In fact, that is what prompted us to add module options to our shared hosting packages.”

On shared plans, users can specify several individually adjustable resources, including bandwidth, disk space, email services, and databases, among other options.

“Even if a shared hosting package comes with X amount of bandwidth, but you need more and don’t want to move up to the next hosting package, you can add more bandwidth individually,” Michael said. “That feature alone is a blessing to our customers, and it makes us very flexible. We can always make things work.”

Next on the agenda for Hostica is an increased focus on the reseller market. The company recently revamped its reseller plans to better serve the consultant segment of its customer base. Now, customers can choose from two straightforward plans. Reseller 1, customized for beginners, includes 20GB web space and 50GB bandwidth. Reseller 2, a professional reseller hosting plan, provides 200GB of space and 4,000GB bandwidth.

Both plans come with cPanel and WHM for admin control over each account, plus preinstalled scripts that make life easier for resellers and their customers by empowering them to install popular applications without web hosting knowledge.

“We love our consultants, and we want to make it easier for them to serve their clients and reduce customer churn, ” Michael said.

If reviews on the Hostica site are any indication, the reseller plans are already a hit with customers. “I’ve always used Hostica for my clients and always will as long as prices remain the most competitive,” said one customer. “The customer service is the best I’ve experienced.”