iWF Hosting Leverages Fully Owned Hardware and Two Decades of Experience to Deliver Shared, Virtual, and Dedicated Solutions

TL; DR: After two decades in the industry, iWF Hosting has earned a reputation for offering reliable, scalable, and competitively priced hosting and colocation solutions. The company’s knowledgeable in-house team, made up of certified engineers and high-level techs, provides customers the support they need to build and maintain a successful online presence. With recent updates to its virtual and dedicated servers plus ongoing development based on incentivized customer feedback, the time-tested host is poised to provide quality services into the next decade and beyond.

When it comes to infrastructure, the best hosts know to expect the unexpected. Between hackers and natural disasters, threats are abundant, and businesses can lose everything if they concentrate all of their resources in one area.

In the U.S., tapping into the power of a geographically dispersed network allows businesses to avoid downtime caused by location-specific catastrophes, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes. iWF Hosting, for example, houses its resources in six distributed datacenter facilities across the U.S., allowing the company to create custom shared, virtual, and dedicated hosting solutions.

“Because of our presence in multiple datacenters, we can build geographically redundant, scalable solutions,” said Jacob Roe-Bauer, Operations Manager at iWF Hosting. “This ensures that in the unlikely scenario that an entire datacenter goes down, a customer’s application will still be up and running.”

The company even protects against nuclear threats through a partnership with the US Secure Hosting Center, a military-grade datacenter located in an underground concrete bunker in rural Iowa — close to the geographical center of the country. Collaborations with datacenters in Nevada, North Carolina, and Oregon, plus two separate locations in California, round out the rest of the company’s dispersed infrastructure.

iWF Hosting owns all of the hardware and network equipment it stores within each facility, which empowers the company to maintain it properly and respond quickly if something goes wrong. “One thing that sets us apart is a lot of the smaller companies are either resellers or they don’t own their infrastructure,” Jacob said. “From the get-go, we have always owned our servers, switches, routers — we have all of those resources available to the customer.”

Founded in 2001, the time-tested provider also boasts a responsive in-house support team of certified engineers and high-level techs. With recent updates to its virtual and dedicated servers plus ongoing development based on customer feedback, iWF Hosting is poised to provide reliable, scalable, and competitively priced hosting and colocation solutions for decades to come.

With 20 years of experience, Jacob said iWF Hosting has seen more than a few trends come and go. The one that’s sticking, he said, is the shift toward the cloud. “As early adopters of the cloud, we’ve really embraced custom-built solutions,” he said. “You can go spin up a VM at DigitalOcean or RamNode, and they’re a dime a dozen. We focus on providing solutions designed to meet the needs of individual customers.”

iWF Hosting’s presence in datacenters across the U.S. helps the company provide those solutions. For example, the dispersed network allows customers with latency-sensitive traffic, such as video streaming and multiplayer online games, to be hosted in datacenters located closer to the users to minimize latency.

The company’s West Coast customers may choose to use the Peer1 facility in Los Angeles, which offers full redundancy in terms of power; heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC); fire suppression, network connectivity, and security. Alternatively, those who require top-notch DDoS protection and the highest uptime standards often turn to iWF’s other Los Angeles location within Psychz Networks.

Of course, Jacob said internet service providers and tech startups looking for a disaster-proof solution turn to iWF Hosting’s shared, virtual, dedicated, and colocation options within USSHC’s underground facility, which was designed to survive direct electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks and will continue to function during and after an F5 tornado.

“In terms of security, you’re not going to get better than that,” he said. “In person, it’s an amazing sight: You see one tower peeking up over a cornfield, then you drive up and there is a massive bunker door going down.”

iWF Hosting is a brand of Florida-based H4Y Technologies LLC, a provider of managed hosting, cloud, virtualization, and reseller services; plus infrastructure deployment, global load balancing, failover services, network DDoS mitigation, and development. “The two different brands have different target audiences,” Jacob said. “iWF Hosting targets SMBs while H4Y is more enterprise-oriented.”

Both companies share a commitment to providing the best customer service possible. On the iWF Hosting side, Jacob said that means responsive, thoroughly trained support techs as opposed to offshore call centers.

“One thing that’s unique is the majority of the time you’re going to be connected directly to a level 3 sysadmin instead of having to go through multiple tiers,” he said. “You’re going to be connected with team members who know what they’re talking about and will be able to help you on the first try.”

The company’s support team, located throughout the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., is thoroughly trained and attends the cPanel Conference every year. At the end of the day, Jacob said support is the biggest differentiator in the hosting industry.

“That’s what we strive to push ourselves on,” he said. “We have excellent techs, we’re team focused, and we know our strengths and weaknesses, so we can pass customers along to someone that we know will get the job done quickly and accurately.”

Customer feedback benefits companies in a variety of ways, allowing them to identify and solve problems and craft a better customer experience through continuous improvements. But not all hosting providers are delivering on customer expectations. According to Microsoft’s 2017 State of the Global Customer Service Report, 52% of people worldwide believe companies need to take more action on the feedback that consumers provide.

iWF Hosting is ahead of the game in that the company actively seeks out feedback through a semiannual customer survey. The survey, which is incentivized through an account credit, helps the company find out what it is doing well and how it can improve.

“It’s worked well for us, and we’ve revised our product offerings multiple times in response,” Jacob said. “For example, we recently doubled the RAM and bandwidth on all of our VPS plans to be more competitive with larger providers because that was something our customers wanted.”

The company’s site builder, Web Crafter, was also developed in response to customer feedback. The WYSIWYG tool empowers users to create stunning, mobile-ready websites that work on all browsers and devices, without a single line of code. Users can customize the layout and design, and take advantage of free marketing and ecommerce tools through simple, drag-and-drop functionality.

If you already have a site, Web Crafter’s automatic setup allows you to import existing information into a new design quickly and easily. In addition to the build-it-yourself option, Web Crafter is also available through a Build4Me! service. “For $300, we will design and create your website within Web Crafter so you can easily edit it down the road yourself,” Jacob said.

Jacob said iWF Hosting refreshes its technology periodically to improve service for all existing customers.

To that end, the company recently updated all of its dedicated servers and reduced prices. It’s also working on transitioning to the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) interface protocol, which enables rapid storage in SSDs.

“That’s going to be the next big trend — going all NVMe instead of just having SSDs — because the performance difference there is outstanding,” he said. “We’re looking to be ahead of the curve on that.”