On the Fast Track

Founded by a duo who were still in high school, a small town webhost has grown rapidly without compromise even as times got tougher.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [July 15, 2004]

Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based FastServers has grown. The company was founded in 1996 as PowerSurge Technologies in the small town of Sumner, Iowa (population 2,100 and falling) by Travis Schaffner and Ian Andrusyk, who were still in high school at the time.

Aaron Philips, who has been with the company since 2000 and is vice president of sales and marketing, says the key event was in 2001, when PowerSurge launched its lower priced FastServers brand. "We had 50 dedicated servers at that time, and were serving shared servers mostly."

The new site launched in January and took off immediately. Even though Philips is director of sales and marketing, he admits no marketing was needed. "We sold our first servers immediately. We were so busy so fast that we didn't want any more business."

A brief look at the forums shows that word of mouth was, in fact, quite powerful. In this discussion on WebHosting Talk, for example, one poster asks, "How did you guys first hear about fastservers?"

The terse response is that they heard about it from the forum itself: "WHT :D"

FastServers until recently used Hurricane Electric but now occupies space in a Cedar Falls, Iowa data center run by Atlanta, Ga.-based Internap.

Philips says that word of mouth sales was helped by the company's dedication to customer service. In this forum post from 2003, Schaffner himself provides updates on 30 minutes of downtime caused when Hurricane reconfigured a key router (we found the post here, in a thread that is entertaining but contains no useful information).

"We're not the biggest in the industry, but our retention rate (as a percentage) is the highest," boasts Philips. "We only get cancellations from businesses that are going out of business."

We contacted the FastServers through SWSoft, whose Plesk product the company embraced in December, 2003. "Our customers were asking for Plesk on a regular basis," says Philips.

He adds that the software's automation features make it easier to do installs, cutting the install time from a full work day to 45 minutes, allowing the key employee to spend more time interacting with customers. He's also pleased to be offering Urchin statistics to Plesk customers.

The company does still offer CPanel and Ensim. The idea is to give customers whatever they want, and that requires knowing what they want.

In fact, customer interaction is the basis of the company's strategy, and that's not likely to change. "All our customer support is in Iowa," says Philips. "We don't cut costs on hardware or support staff. When you're competing with prices of $59, $79, $69 per month, you have to keep the hardware quality high, wrapped in a high quality of service."

The company's cheapest package is $128 per month, down about $10 from 2001, during which time industry prices have fallen much farther, from $99 to as low as $59 per month. Holding the line on pricing seems to be working well for FastServers, keeping company on its own fast track.

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