Number 1 position according to American Magazine HostReview
Leaseweb has been occupying the number 1 position on the list of the world’s fastest growing hosting companies for 6 months now. The Fastest Growing Companies list is published monthly by the American magazine HostReview.
“If we continue to grow as we did in the past year, I expect that Leaseweb will remain in the number 1 spot for a while yet,” says Con Zwinkels, Managing Director of hosting provider Leaseweb. “In the past 12 months we have doubled the number of employees – and we still have at least 30 job openings. We have also doubled the capacity of our hosting network. We are expanding our Support Unit from some 30 to 50 employees. And we are already Dell’s biggest internet partner in Europe. To top it all off, in one year we have managed to fill nearly 500 data center cabinets with hosting equipment at the EvoSwitch CO2-neutral data center.”
Deloitte Technology Fast 50
Leaseweb was already listed in 18th position on the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 of 2007. According to Zwinkels, “This position on the American HostReview list is extra special to me. To us, it confirms that we are not only working hard on growing but that the market is also seeing that. Not just in the Netherlands, but around the world.”
Growth thanks to virtualization
In the near future, Leaseweb will be able to continue its fast expansion thanks to virtualization. “Using virtualization enables us to allocate server space to customers in a much more flexible way,” explains Zwinkels. “It also allows us to roll out new servers even more quickly. We already have a Windows Express Server and a Linux Express Server that can be live within 24 hours. Virtualization would speed up the rollout of new servers even more.” Among other things, Leaseweb employs virtualization experts in the field of VMware and is a Microsoft launching partner for the virtualization feature via Hyper-V, which will be released as a part of Windows Server 2008 later this year.
Growth of the worldwide hosting network
Customer demand for bandwidth is growing very quickly at Leaseweb. This is why Leaseweb is currently restructuring its sizeable global hosting network. The recent acquisition of two Cisco Carrier Routing System 1s (CRS-1s) will make Leaseweb’s network infrastructure more hierarchical and scaleable and enables a bandwidth capacity increase to 1900 Gigabits per second (1.9 Terabits). “The CRS-1s and the related new network architecture will allow us to accommodate the predicted growth in internet traffic,” says Zwinkels. “As a result, Leaseweb customers can be sure that our growth potential in terms of bandwidth for the next few years is huge.”
Big accounts: Hyves, 123Video
The growth of both Leaseweb and its hosting network attract customers that need a lot of bandwidth. Hyves, for instance, has already selected Leaseweb as its premier provider. And 123Video, the Dutch version of YouTube, has also switched to Leaseweb in the past year. 123Video is growing so quickly that it expects to exceed the 12 Gbps of required bandwidth as early as next year. “Customers who need this much bandwidth need a hosting partner that is able to expand bandwidth quickly and properly,” explains Zwinkels. “Our philosophy is to maintain twice as much capacity as is consumed by our customers. The great advantage is that we attract big customers, which in turn drives even faster growth.”