BEDFORD, Texas, Oct 6, 2003 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Building on a solid financial footing, C I Host has reached a new milestone -- 200,000 customers in 182 countries around the globe. A recognized leader in Web hosting and Internet infrastructure solutions, C I Host has continued to grow even as other Internet-related companies have faltered.

In the same month that the 200,000th customer joined C I Host, the firm received a Fast Tech 50 award from Deloitte and Touche for being one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the Texas Crescent Technology, based on revenue growth.

Between 2001 and 2003, C I Host not only doubled its customer base, but enjoyed a 690 percent revenue growth, enabling it to expand its Texas and Los Angeles facilities and open a new data center in Chicago. At the same time, C I Host has extended its reach beyond the small- and medium-sized market to serve large corporations. It now hosts more than 5,000 dedicated servers.

"The credit for reaching this 200,000th milestone and for our increased revenue goes to our employees and resellers," said Christopher Faulkner, CEO of C I Host. "We have kept our focus on the needs of our customers and have taken the lead in guaranteed uptime, top level security and innovative Internet solutions."

A combination of forces and business decisions has given C I Host the solid foundation that has enabled it not only to withstand, but to thrive in the unsettled economic climate that has forced other firms to cut back, withdraw and sometimes fold their tents.

"We were able to plough all the revenues back into the company long enough for it to get its sea legs," Faulkner said. "We have no long-term debt. We have never had to rely on outside venture capital. All of our facilities are wholly owned and operated by us."

Because it continued to grow through the recent rough times, C I Host is perfectly positioned to ride the current upswing in the economy and technology sector to even higher levels of achievement.

Faulkner, 26, founded C I Host in December of 1995 and ran it out of his college dorm room, doing everything that needed to be done. He researched technical questions from clients, woke up in the middle of the night to take calls from overseas customers and planned marketing strategy.

The killing pace paid off. In its first six months, C I Host set a new record by being the first start-up company to break into the top 25 web hosting companies in the world as ranked by the now defunct Web Host List. C I Host has grown by a minimum of 200 percent every year since it was founded.

During the first six months of 2003, C I Host took several steps to position itself to expand its customer base.

The firm received the federal HIPAA certification, thus making it eligible to provide information technology services to the more than 2 million health care organizations that must meet strict new patient confidentiality regulations. HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

C I Host's core data center facility in Texas passed the rigorous audit called the SAS 70, which is required for companies who want to provide IT services to firms with high security and confidentiality requirements.

C I Host also became one of the first Web hosting firms to offer hosting on the new OS X Apple servers. C I Host launched a new suite of customized solutions that takes advantage of the power and stability of Apple's Xserve with Mac OS X to offer small and medium sized businesses another option in Web hosting.

C I Host's reseller program, launched in 1996, has developed into one of the most robust, transparent and profitable reseller networks in the industry. More than 8,500 resellers in 25 countries now sell C I Host products and services as their own.

One of the more high profile Private Label Partner resellers, added this year, is CompUSA, which sells C I Host products and services. C I Host also opened one of the first bricks and mortar technology stores in the country, the C I Host Technology Store in the Dallas Galleria.

At a time when people are increasingly nervous about security, C I Host has consistently gone the extra mile to protect its networks, and thus its clients' data. It patched all its existing servers before the August attack of the MSBlast (Lovsan) worm, and was one of the few Web hosts to completely patch its servers against Code Red, sparing its customers most of the headaches of that worm.

"We know what our customers need to succeed in their competitive fields, and we give it to them," Faulkner said. "When they are successful, we are successful."

About C I Host

C I Host (www.cihost.com), based in the Dallas/Fort Worth market, is a Web hosting and Internet solutions provider, domain name registrar (DNR) and application service provider (ASP), serving 200,000 individual consumers and businesses in 182 countries worldwide. The company creates business-class Web hosting solutions for the small- and medium-enterprise (SME) market, with the broadest portfolio of managed hosting and value-added services in the industry.

C I Host has been consistently ranked among the Top 5 Web hosting companies out of 16,000 around the globe. C I Host's turn-key services range from initial domain name registration to custom dedicated servers for e- commerce. C I Host is headquartered from its main facility and Network Operations Center in Bedford, Texas, and the company operates three diverse data centers in Los Angeles, New York City and Chicago.

Editorial Contact:

D. Kent Pingel
Public Relations Director
C I Host
+1-888-868-9931 ext. 7006
kentp@cihost.com

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