ServerFreak: 15 Years of Affordable, Customer-Centric Web Hosting Focused on Support and Customizable Solutions

TL; DR: Among Malaysia’s fastest growing hosting providers, ServerFreak blends the best of technical expertise with customer-focused support and ease of use. The company has owned its own hardware and equipment from the start, locating it in five global datacenters to better serve Asian and American customers. ServerFreak keeps a finger on the pulse of customer needs, pushing ahead on simple yet robust solutions for WordPress hosting and drag-and-drop website builders. With teams located in the U.S. and Malaysia, ServerFreak ensures local support is available at all times.

Despite 15 years of growth, ServerFreak maintains the nimble energy and no-frills demeanor commonly associated with young startups. The company takes a straightforward approach to web hosting by focusing on technology, customer service, and a do-it-yourself attitude that permeates all the way to the top of the company’s ranks.

In 2003, college student Sam Lee and a friend explored their interest in server technologies and built the beginnings of ServerFreak. When his business partner left to explore other opportunities, Sam and ServerFreak languished and lost their focus. A new relationship, however, reinvigorated Sam’s passion for the hosting industry, according to Sales Consultant Hana.

“She decided to support him, and they continued to run the business with their own money,” Hana said. “They continued investing in buying servers and then built the datacenter from the ground up.”

Now, ServerFreak provides the full range of web hosting services to a global audience of personal bloggers, small businesses, and large companies. The company emphasizes shortening customers’ time to market and empowers them to get online as quickly and easily as possible.

“The main thing we focus on is our customer support because our clients are looking for a solution to a particular problem or need,” Hana said. “From there, we try to understand what they are trying to achieve and direct them to the right services that will deliver what they need.”

In response to customer requests, ServerFreak recently launched an optimized WordPress hosting platform that balances high-performance solid-state drive, RAID-10 storage with a web application firewall that safeguards customers against vulnerabilities like SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and forgery requests.

The company’s WordPress infrastructure is powered by LiteSpeed web servers, which is a drop-in replacement for Apache that performs about three times faster. Combined with LSCache plugins, ServerFreak gives users a transparent look into the performance benefits gained from the resource-hungry WordPress platform.

Additionally, the infrastructure’s built-in support for HTTP/2 and QUIC mean requests and responses can be combined, enabling webpages and data to load at least twice as fast. But performance and security protocols aside, Hana said the platform is truly meant to serve customers who may not know what they’re doing.

“Most of our customers who go for the WordPress hosting do so because they don’t have to know it all,” she said. “They want to have web hosting, and they want us to set it up for them.”

ServerFreak’s WordPress hosting plans come with the Softaculous library of more than 340 installation scripts and the helpful cPanel interface, but support technicians are on standby and will help install the content management system and configure any added eCommerce or email services.

“We try to predict the challenges in the hosting environment,” Hana said. “When WordPress became so popular, we knew there would be more and more cyberattacks happening. We want to notice those types of things before they cause issues for our customers. We want to provide great service to our customers, but we also try to solve their problems along the route.”

Despite the company’s relatively small size — Hana estimated the team consists of roughly 25 people across the Malaysian and U.S. offices — ServerFreak provides 24/7 technical support through live chat and email tickets. The different geographical locations of the teams mean someone is always awake and available to help customers with any issues.

“We just try to take care of our customers and meet their requirements,” Hana said. “We try to keep as up-to-date as we can, respond to issues promptly, and educate our customers as needed.”

Because ServerFreak owns and operates its own servers in five first-class datacenters — three in Malaysia, one in Dallas, and another in Los Angeles — the company can quickly respond to clients and fix the problem. According to Hana, ServerFreak aims to respond to support tickets within 15 minutes.

“Our client will be in good shape when we can solve their issue late at night or mornings at 2 a.m.,” she said. “Because we maintain our own servers, we have more access to quickly provide assistance.”

ServerFreak will even go so far as to work with customers who may be experiencing financial hardships by reducing prices and adjusting hosting packages to continue helping them stay online. The company’s focus on personalized, individual support resonates especially with the portion of the customer base who came to ServerFreak after leaving massive and unhelpful hosting providers.

“We try to cut down prices and help instead of just letting them go,” Hana said. “We try to be as understanding and as flexible as possible.”

Moving forward, Hana told us that ServerFreak will concentrate on providing customers with a custom website builder. The company currently partners with the Weebly drag-and-drop platform, which enables customers to quickly and easily create personal websites and online stores without writing any code.

ServerFreak’s Weebly packages are constructed to serve a range of customers from individual site owners to small groups and online stores. The lowest tier restricts users to selling a maximum of 10 products, while the middle plan introduces added web design features like video backgrounds, site search, and password protection. The Business package allows for membership registration and removes transaction fees and restrictions on the number of products, and opens the door for digital products, inventory management, coupons, and a shipping or tax calculator.

Despite Weebly’s wide range of services and ease of use, Hana said that ServerFreak wants to ensure customers don’t get cornered or trapped into one product.

“There are options in the market, but they’re not as customer-friendly as we’d like, especially if they’re interested in converting to WordPress later on,” she said. “We just want to provide more solutions to our customers.”

As with other WYSIWYG builders, Weebly features customizable modules for text, photo, maps, and videos. The platform also connects users to design templates, blogging tools, SEO services, and eCommerce functionality.

ServerFreak also provides customers with custom website design and development services, emphasizing clarity, simplicity, and usability particularly relevant to new businesses looking to introduce themselves to target audiences.

“More of our customers want to have a website and be able to make changes on the go, but they do not have the technical skills,” Hana said. “We need to provide this individualized solution for them in a way that helps them grow into our other plans. Like with our dedicated and cloud servers, we customize our packages around their needs to make it just right for them.”