A. At Hostway we have built up a global presence on all four continents, which now allows us to practice cutting-edge distributed development programs that combine the skills and competencies of each SBU, and at the same time allows us to pass on real economies of scale to our customers.

A. First and foremost as a company, we pride ourselves on customer responsiveness. Our telephone and email response times are amongst the fastest in the hosting industry, and generally speaking, 80% of technical support issues are resolved at the first time of asking.

From a technical standpoint, our customers also appreciate the enormous investment we make as a group into the Research & Design of our products. Right now for instance we are preparing the launch of a brand new set of management tools and infrastructure - both customer facing and non-customer facing - which are all built on the latest technologies such as Ruby On Rails and the .Net platform, and which we are confident will take our hosting offering to the next level in the eyes new and existing customers.

Thirdly, I would say that our breadth of experience in terms of what we can offer our customers is also a crucial factor behind customer retention. At Hostway we nurture clients at every stage - whether from small beginnings up to dedicated servers, or from simple development platforms into fully fledged enterprise level requirements that involve more complex management and architecture design - such as load-balancing, bespoke firewall or application monitoring, and NAS/SAN storage.

A. The constant 24/7 effort certainly takes its toll on our systems and support staff in particular, but this is life in the 24/7 hosting economy and we are not the only type of business that has to think and implement our resources on a constant basis - so I don't think there will ever be any respite! The key to keeping our customers and employees happy of course is to have the processes, people and technology in place that mean we can easily cope.