Leaseweb USA Expands its Customizable Hosting Solutions to Meet Your Digital Needs

TL; DR: Ever felt limited on hosting options? Leaseweb has expanded its hosting service over the years to meet the needs of all kinds of users. Its high-performance hosting serves various industries but is especially suited for demanding use cases, including big data, gaming, and eCommerce. We spoke with Richard Copeland, CEO of Leaseweb USA, about the hosting service and how it distinguishes itself from its competitors.

We could all agree that a restaurant without a menu, well, isn’t much of a restaurant. You wouldn’t expect to sit down at a table and choose from a menu with only a single dish on it. A dining experience involves much more than that, even if the cooking staff may prepare that one dish really well.

A true restaurant experience includes appetizers, entrées, desserts, and everything in between so you, your friends, and people with all kinds of tastes can enjoy its food.

Just as with restaurants, a hosting service shouldn’t be adept at tackling just one issue. And the hosting company Leaseweb USA certainly isn’t.

Leaseweb offers a breadth of hosting solutions, from servers to object storage and CDNs. Over the years, its catalog has expanded to meet the needs of its diverse customer base.

“The menu expanded quite a bit. We have multiple flavors of VMware, single tenant and multitenant. We also have multiple elastic compute, public cloud, and VPS platforms. We’ve really expanded with the industry from a product perspective,” said Richard Copeland, CEO of Leaseweb USA.

Leaseweb takes pride in its flexibility and capability to respond to various needs and goals. When customers come to its site, they don’t have to worry about working their way around a limited service catalog. Leaseweb does everything it can to give users what they need and solve their pain points while at it.

Leaseweb is a global company headquartered in Amsterdam, Netherlands, with a subsidiary in the U.S. where Richard is the CEO. Since his time there, Leaseweb has seen much growth.

“Since 2013, we started to grow astronomically and acquired companies through the help of our parent company. I started to grow my own career, going from a senior account manager to sales manager and senior sales director to ultimately CEO,” said Richard.

The acquisition of three hosting companies helped grow Leaseweb’s staff and infrastructure footprint in the United States. More recently they expanded their existing data centers in New York, Miami and Washington, D.C. From a capacity perspective, Leaseweb acquired a whole new fleet of servers and increased its number of racks..

“We always try to pride ourselves on optimizing price versus performance, using economies of scale. Buying through providers like Dell and HP, in bulk, and then passing along those savings to our customers – but with improved performance levels,” said Richard.

But arguably the best highlight of its expansion was its increase in hosting offerings. Prior to its product expansion, Leaseweb was primarily a boutique host that specialized in dedicated servers with private and shared racks.

“Our growth has really been customer focused. In the early years customers in our shared rack environment needed to have their severs located in the same rack and lease a private switch. Now customers can have servers located in multiple racks across our data center and have private networking without leasing a private switch increasing their redundancy”, said Richard.

Leaseweb offers all kinds of hosting services and features, including CDN and Managed Kubernetes support. It has solutions for both users who want traditional solutions, including colocation, or more modern options, such as VMware and hybrid cloud.

“So although we offer a service where we can provide leased servers, a lot of our customers are looking to acquire their own equipment and just get space, power and bandwidth from us,” said Richard.

Richard told us Leaseweb’s top three selling points among its customers are its dedicated servers, cloud hosting, and colocation services. For its dedicated hosting, Leaseweb offers both shared and private rack infrastructure. Private rack allows more security conscious customers to have their own rack space for compliance and data protection purposes.

Users can also choose hosting plans according to specific characteristics they need. Leaseweb has plans dedicated to high performance, GPU usage, high bandwidth, and gaming, among others.

When hunting for a web host, a trusted reputation usually indicates you’ve found a good one. But there are some hosts that go above and beyond and enlist themselves as a partner along your digital journey. And Leaseweb happens to be one of those web hosts.

Creating human solutions is at the top of mind for Leaseweb. And having an in-house development team makes this process much more accessible.

“We try to be visionaries. We build a lot of our own products in house. We think about how we can take care of prospects that we haven’t even talked to and how we can help customers move their business forward and make sure they run it efficiently and effectively,” said Richard.

Problem-solving is a significant component of Leaseweb’s business approach. Leaseweb builds solutions to accommodate users in the present and help them move forward for the future. One way it does this is by considering and responding to customer pain points.

“We pride ourselves on being the trusted advisor to our customers. So we want to listen to them and then find out what their pain points are. We’re not just trying to sell them anything. I would rather turn down a deal because we can’t do it as opposed to just selling them something just because,” said Richard.

Leaseweb maintains a constant, open line of communication with customers.

“Everybody at Leaseweb is talking to the customers and getting feedback. And we run it through internally and try to figure out how to serve them better,” said Richard.

Although solving customer problems is its bread and butter, Leaseweb also stays abreast of industry trends to improve its service. Richard said a major part of Leaseweb’s success has been due to their interactions with its global team.

The global team, headquartered in Amsterdam, is at the helm of the product strategy for Leaseweb. Both teams work together to create solutions to propel the business forward.

“We do solution engineering. We work with the product team and tell them what we’re seeing. And when we have a customer request that goes beyond the scope of what we normally offer, we open up a nonstandard request and get a brain trust together to figure out if we can solve it,” said Richard.

Flexibility has always been a key trait of Leaseweb’s hosting approach. In fact, during its early years, Leaseweb had a boutique style business.

“Over the years, we were that boutique offering where we would be able to give a customer solution and it wouldn’t be that cookie cutter solution. We would have the flexibility to give them what they were looking for,” said Richard.

Since then, Leaseweb has standardized its solutions. But it still finds ways to reflect its roots by tailoring solutions to user needs. Richard told us Leaseweb works with customers to customize its solutions so they accommodate their businesses and mission-critical applications.

“We’re still flexible in terms of talking to the customers, trying to be a trusted advisor, and making sure that first we see that we can fit them in our current standardized product. If we can’t, we won’t just say no. We’ll look at what we can do to take care of them,” said Richard.

Leaseweb may not make customer solutions from scratch anymore. But introducing automation and standardizations has done wonders for its platform.

“We may not have that same level of flexibility from the past, but it also turns into a positive for our customers because now they can automate, order through the website and customer portal, and get our floating IP range and other features. Automation helps us be able to deliver faster,” said Richard.

Leaseweb is on a constant wave of innovation. As for what the team is doing next, it will be adding more upgrades to its solutions in the near future.

“We’re adding more providers to our multi CDN platform. We’re also actively adding features to our Public Cloud offering and making our cloud connect platform towards hyperscalers (like AWS) redundant. These are a few things that we’re actively working on to roll out very soon,” said Richard.