In this interview, we are speaking with Mr. Cesar Lopes, the CEO of HOST4, a company that has been operating for 15 years in the website hosting market.
Today, their primary focus is on the quality of their services, and they are always looking for innovation.
You’ve been on the market for 15 years. Can you tell us how did everything start?
It all started in 2004 in a conversation with a friend who was also a web programmer and we discussed some difficulties we had with the hosting services available at the time and mainly due to the lack of support from companies. This aroused the desire to found a company that these problems and offers a better service for companies and especially for developers like us.
What were the main challenges you had to face along the way?
There were numerous challenges at the time and the main one is that we were not server administrators, but just programmers, so we had to study the subject and hire at least one specialist at the time to help us, and we also had to find quality Data Center to become a project partner.
Where are your data centers based?
We currently work with 3 Data Centers, the main one is in Brazil where we serve most of our customers and we have a contract with 2 more Data Centers, one in the US and one in Canada that assist in Backup and other services depending on the needs of our customers.
Can you tell us about the hosting packages that you offer?
We work with 3 main packages and their focus is mainly to serve small companies where the contractor often wants the programmer himself to have as little work as possible with the infrastructure and configurations, either the company or the programmer can hire and put his project on the air very quickly, you can get the site into production and have your email account personalized many times in a few hours.
How does your MAX HOST4 hosting plan work?
The MAX plan primarily caters to companies that need more features, more email accounts, and more space both for website files and to keep a copy of emails on the server.
What are your main customers, and where are they coming from?
More than 80% of our customers are small businesses that need to advertise their product or service on the internet and also need a professional email address and 99% of our customers are resident in Brazil
Can you tell us something more about your backup options?
Backup is one of the most important pillars of our company, we know how important it is to protect our customers’ information, in short, the backup is done in 3 locations, the first is on the server itself where the customer’s account is where access is super fast on a separate disk, and the other two in different Data Centers. As much as Data Centers have numerous security items, we each chose to separate backups in different locations to further protect information from any catastrophe that could occur anywhere.
What are the top 5 things that HOST4 is different from the competition?
The main feature that has always differentiated us from competitors is the support. We always value humanized and efficient support that solves the customer’s problem as quickly as possible, another point is the ease for the customer to be able to publish their project as quickly as possible, another investment is in technology to provide an updated platform with the latest technologies on the market without forgetting security which is also a very important point of and last but not least backup as we have explained before we invest a lot in this area.
What are the plans of HOST4 for 2023 in terms of new technologies and products?
The technology market is very dynamic and we are always in contact with our suppliers seeking to offer the most advanced to our customers, our strategy for 2023 is to improve the spam filter, the quality of email sending and improve the webmail usage experience.
What advice do you give to people looking for a web hosting provider?
The advice I would like to share works for any area, first is to work with what you like. There is a saying that goes something like this “Work with what you love and you will never have to work again in your life”, I believe it is super valid you don’t necessarily have to love it, but you have to have an affinity with the area and the second piece of advice is to identify a problem or difficulty and try to solve it so you can stand out.
