About LCHost

LCHost was founded in 2000, targeting the then popular linux shell product space, offering high quality services at industry leading pricing. Those customers who have been with us since the beginning have come to know LCHost as a company strongly geared towards providing unsurpassed stability and value for money - illustrated through their loyalty and our exceptionally high customer retention rate.

By the beginning of 2004, the company had grown considerably - now offering high quality UK based webhosting packages in their own right rather than as an add-on to a shell account, shoutcast streaming media services, and gameservers - through its subsidiary brand LCGaming. Operating profits yielded during the past 4 years had been ploughed back into buying new equipment and helping to grow the business.

In July of 2004 the company was formalised and Low Cost Host Ltd was founded, and in August of 2004 Low Cost Host Ltd negotiated to acquire the network and customer base of their embattled ultimate upstream provider, Woaf Tech Ltd, in order to gain full control over the network and connectivity, ensuring continued stability not only for our own operations, but existing Woaf Tech Ltd customers as well.

In quick form the fortunes of the network were turned around, and was turning an operating profit within 2 months of acquisition - having haemorrhaged money for the previous 6 months. From there, we stockpiled the funds necessary to see through the first stage of overhauling the old acquired network and installed new equipment in October 2005, multiplying the peak capacity of the network core 20-fold, and with an ultimate capacity of over 100-fold the equipment we replaced.

Moving forward, Low Cost Host Limited is committed to a long term plan of network and hardware upgrades in order to improve on current service levels, all the while maintaining what we believe is the best value pricing in the UK marketplace.

Why Choose LCHost?

Well, all salesmanship aside, here's some facts:

• UK Company, UK Servers, UK Staff
• Trading for over eight years
• Own and operate our own network
• #1 Ranked for speed, and over twice as fast as 90+% of the competition in the UK
  (source: webperf.net - tests run against a REAL customer hosting server)
• Tailored solutions available to any requirement
• No-nonsense sales, products, and support
• Selected by Individuals and Public sector alike - and everything inbetween!
• Transparent and honest about problems and maintenance
  (See our full off-net announcements archive for proof!)
• We answer the phone, too!
  (though some services do not ordinarily come with phone support)

History

A not so brief overview of important milestones, events and trivia in our company's history. While most seem trivial now in relation to the activities of the company today, at the time they were newsworthy to us! From our humble beginnings renting an already 4 year old server from "some guy we knew", to the present day.

• June 2000 - "Low Cost Host" started as a sole trader enterprise offering Linux shells and hosting on a rented single P2-266 server - storm.lchost.co.uk.
  
  
• December 2001 - The doubling of our IP pool from 32 IPs to 64 IPs was, back then, a newsworthy event, and came about as a result of the success of our "private vhost" service. These days LCHost has a Provider Aggregatable ("PA") allocation from RIPE it uses to service it's customer requirements from which totals over 16,000 IP addresses.
  
  
• April 2002 - In response to staggering demand we had no choice but to stop taking orders - even after upgrading to a mighty P2-333 (the fastest the system motherboard could take) storm was beginning to buckle under the load and in order to protect our existing customers we halted any further sales.
  
  
• June 2002 - maelstrom.lchost.co.uk is born - a dual P3/800Mhz system based on a Gigabyte 1U barebone - replacing the veteran storm.lchost.co.uk.
  
  
• November 2002 - SSL was enabled on all of our services such as mail, ftp, etc in response to the compromise of a couple of user accounts as a result of network traffic being sniffed from a compromised machine belonging to another company on the same network segment as ours. While we managed to fight off the intruder and prevent the loss of any of our customer's data, the other machine from which they launched their attack was less lucky - as a result of the owner's nonexistent security update policy, they had taken root control of the machine and promptly erased the whole box as soon as they were discovered by us.
  
  
• June 2003 - After a spate of denial of service attacks on another shell server that was hosted by our supplier, our supplier found themselves presented with a 30-day eviction notice from their upstream supplier. Despite the relatively small volume of traffic involved by comparison to today's denial of service attacks, the pressure on the upstream's network was too great - and our supplier moved from the then Redbus Harbour Exchange facility to Telehouse East, becoming a customer of Woaf Tech Ltd.
  
  
• December 2003 - in response to falling trade costs and end user pricing from our competitors, this month saw us launch a new line of webhosting packages - costing less than a quarter of the old pricing (which hadn't been revised since the inception of the company in 2000), they proved to be popular and trade was brisk, signing up some 50 additional customers in the first two months.
  
  
• February 2004 - Expanding our product base to track customer requests and general industry activity, we introduced our first 'off the shelf' dedicated server product - the Intel Super Budget - which at the time was very keenly priced.
  
  
• July 2004 - "Low Cost Host Ltd" formed and the business operations transferred. VAT registration soon followed.
  
  
• August 2004 - We negotiated the purchase of WoafTech Ltd's customer base and network infrastructure, and completed it the same month. WoafTech had been embattled both financially and technically for some time and there was a genuine issue in getting work requests completed through them. Rather than face the prospect of moving host network again, we made arrangements to secure their assets and our own stability.
  
  
• November 2004 - After a brief flirtation with accepting credit card payments, we ended our trial abruptly when our payment processor (who were US based) proved unable to tell the difference between GBP and USD and ended up debiting our customers for a figure in dollars and remitting the same figure in pounds to us. At the time we predicted that it would be some time before credit card payments would return, due to the fact that take up had been low. This proved to be accurate as Credit Card processing did not reappear until over 4 years later, when we installed our new online billing system.
  
  
• April 2005 - Having sold in very quick order every Super Budget dedicated server we put in the racks we expanded our 'off-the-shelf' dedicated product line to add a higher spec machine - the Budget Plus.
  
  
• October 2005 - Less than 18 months after the rescue of the WoafTech network from financial doom, and in response to the growing number of attacks on customers that were proving far too much for the routing equipment to handle, we implemented the first major upgrade of the network - replacing one of the ancient Cisco 7200VXR routers with a Cisco 6500 with the then top-of-the-line SUP720-3BXL supervisor engine. This instantly increased our capacity 20-fold compared to the previous installation, and provided us with a solid base to grow on.
  
  
• November 2006 - By now all of the old routing infrastructure had been laid to rest, and we had upgraded all of our externally facing transit supplier links to at least 1Gbps. Since then we have weathered a number of attacks the likes of which would have easily crushed the old network, and with no collateral damage to other customers on the network. We are, by no means, 'DoS Proof' - but our innocent customers who would often become an unintended casualty of attacks we had to bear the brunt of now enjoy a much quieter life.
  
  
• March 2008 - After a quiet and steady couple of years, we finally laid to rest one of the last legacies of the WoafTech infrastructure and replaced and reorganised the rack cabinet containing the core network entirely. This was something that had always needed to be done, but we had put it off in the interests of stabilising the network infrastructure first. This work was completed with a relatively low amount of customer impact as we kept most customers online by use of temporary networking equipment deployed straight onto the middle of the floor surface in the datacentre to carry the load.
  
  
• August 2009 - After years of consistently featuring in the top 20 fastest UK hosts on the Webperf rankings, LCHost claims 1st place. In the same week, the venerable (if beige) website design that has served us and our customers so well for over 9 years is finally laid to rest with the launch of our new look site, complete with standards compliance and, of course, a tweaked logo.