The following article was published by TopHosts July 10, 2002. TopHosts is the leading web hosting evaluation service worldwide. TopHosts ranked Aplus.Net #4 worldwide among thousands of web hosting companies.

The lavender walls are plainly noticeable as you enter the office facility of San Diego's Aplus.Net.

"Soothing" is the description used by one of the TopHosts.Com sales executives, who toured the company's lavish headquarters in mid-June.

That essentially encapsulates the feeling customers have when they phone up the company's state-of-the-art NOC in search of assistance.

Four giant screens are employed to monitor the company's internal network and the volume of calls in the queue with a listing of the average wait time.

"All calls listed on this screen will be answered and dealt with within a 24-hour period," noted Courtney Pelz, Aplus's Marketing Project Manager.

That attention to customer service is the not-so-secret sauce responsible for the company's growth since founding in 1995. Aplus has steadily expanded its customer base and its revenues by more than 100 percent since inception.

As Pelz continued the office tour, the acres of space and new office furniture are immediately apparent. The company acquired the facility from a bankrupt wireless outfit early in 2002. The vacant area is referred to as the "built for growth" section.

True to those words, in early May, Aplus announced the acquisition of Cedant Web Hosting Inc. which brought in an additional 15,000 subscriber accounts. This boosts the company's hosting customer figure to 50,000. Cedant will continue operations as a division of Aplus.Net, and maintain the brand name. The company's CEO, Ivan Vachovsky said, "we maintain the philosophy that if it isn't broke, don't fix it."

Vachovsky said that other acquisitions are in store for the company but details will be forthcoming. "We will not just look at price but the quality of the customers, the internal procedures used and the ability to streamline."

He adds, "We will continue to expand our customer base by maintaining our reputation through quality service and support. We've done this for the past seven years and we intend to build on this. Our expertise in integrating customers and providing small businesses with high quality Web hosting products and services is the foundation of our success."

In addition to Cedant, Aplus has several other websites geared at marketing their hosting plans to the appropriate end user. For example, Aplus.Lycos.com is a co-branded site that has special-priced offers to Lycos users. Additionally, Websolo is targeted to the budget conscious and Server4me caters to customers requiring dedicated hosting.

The last leg of the tour was the company's IDC which features all the necessary elements to provide 24 X 7 network monitoring. Advanced security equipment such as access card entry, biometric scanners, motion detectors and 24-hour closed circuit video surveillance are all utilized. Redundant power systems with uninterrupted power supply (UPS) enables the network to keep operating for up to twenty minutes until the diesel generator is activated.

Aplus.Net's Courtney Pelz and TopHosts.Com sales executive, Jon Landry, stand outside of the company's NOC to discuss the importance of quick and efficient customer service.

Aplus is a stickler for testing the cables in the data center, noted Pelz. Every cable in the IDC has to be scrutinized not just for connectivity but also for its availability to carry data at the highest theoretical speed. Aplus.Net deploys two OC-12 high-speed digital fiber optic links with a service capacity of 24 T3 lines or 672 T1lines.

In addition to the traditional racks of shared, dedicated and co-located servers, standard fare for an IDC, one can see the Virtual Private Servers. This popular addition has quickly caught on to the customers that require the features of the dedicated option — control, access and security — at a third of the usual prices.

Moving from the calming lavender interior to a secure server fortress, we now understand why 50,000 strong regard Aplus.Net as their websites safe haven. And if the past seven years are any indication, "built for success" might well be the more appropriate billing.

- TopHosts.com Feature Article