Today, we had the chance to speak to Mr. Nicolas Depredurand, the director of LWS, a French hosting company.
Take a break from your everyday activities and read this great interview.
As we can see, LWS is a company specialized in domain name sales and web hosting for more than 20 years.
Can you tell us the story behind LWS, and a little more about how it all started?
It all started when I was a student. In 1999, I was creating websites for friends, for myself or for companies during the summer to earn some money.
The web hosting part was very complicated. Indeed, I wanted to find ideally a French-speaking host to be able to communicate with him in case of need of assistance. And at the same time, I wanted to find a complete provider in order to buy my domain name and my web hosting with only one interlocutor. Because I started from the logic that if there was a technical failure: how to contact the domain name registrar and the web host? At that time I had no technical knowledge in the subject of web hosting and domain name registration.
In 1999, there were very few French providers. The prices were very expensive and the offers very complicated. I had 2 – 3 bad experiences. Suddenly, I said to myself that there was something to do. That’s how I went deeper into the subject, what did I have to do to be a web host? How did it work?
That’s when I decided to create the company
(Ligne Web Services) in order to propose simplified, complete, and affordable offers. Hence the slogan that has never changed since: “LWS, the web host accessible to all“.Accessible to all in terms of price and use.
What were the challenges you faced when you started the company?
The challenges were multiple.
1st challenge: How to create a company? That was the administrative challenge. In France, it is easy to get information. It may not be the easiest country, but it is not the most complicated part.
Then: How do you finance? For the time being, I was totally self-financed. I worked a bit during a few summers and in parallel to my studies. That’s how I started financing. I financed the whole project by myself, I didn’t take out any credit, nothing at all.
I had looked for clients, potential clients before starting the project, who could commit themselves at the time of the creation according to my little business plan that I had made at the time.
Then, I built brick by brick. At the time there was no control panel.
You had to make the sales site. It was relatively simple. Making a sales site, even without training, I had a lot of instinct for sales. And it wasn’t too complicated for me. I found a graphic designer who helped me with the design of the site. For the technical side, there was no problem. Setting up an online payment was not too complicated for me. I was able to quickly learn, quickly set up the sales site.
Then for the creation of the web hosting service. There, I had to create a control panel for the customers, a customer space. Because I wanted to deliver to the customer by being as automated as possible. So to make delivery robots, or semi-automatic, because everything was not automatic from the beginning.
Then find out where to put the servers, where to buy them, what OS to put behind them.
In web hosting, there is the web service, databases, and mail service.
Even in 1999, we were already using PHP, already a database, and already a complete mail service with webmail.
The big difference compared to now is that there was only one version of PHP, there were much fewer spam problems, and the sites themselves consumed much fewer resources. So on small machines, you could already host a lot of sites on it. And there were fewer DDOS attacks or other attacks. They were attacks, but they were different. So it was quite simple technologically speaking to do. And when you were serious, you just had to get the right hardware and it was fine.
Then for the web hosting part, we had to find a Data center. That was more complicated, there were far fewer of them than today. They were only in Paris, if you wanted fiber optics. There were a few in the provinces, but the price would not have matched the offer. I would not have been able to make a final service offer at the right price. So a data center in Paris, hence the fact that I set up in Paris at the beginning. Although I’m not from Paris, I’m from the east of France, where I set up my head office years later. Since the fiber optics allowed it, as well as the size of the structure.
Then there was the domain name part. For the domain name part, I was not accredited right away. However, I dug around to find out exactly how it worked.
I managed to get a big partnership with a registrar specially designed for companies like me, with APIs. In 1999, it was not the same APIs as now, it was not democratized at all. But it allowed us to buy domain names almost automatically.
was created very quickly. We were able to offer a global service to our customers and thus control the end-to-end chain.What are the core values for you and your team that drive the company in the right direction?
The core values have evolved over time but remain based on service to the customer.
Now, the customer wants a turnkey service with seamless support for all their questions.
Before, even if the server was working, the support pretty much stopped there for the customer. We would do a diagnostic, what we provided worked, so the problem was with the customer, with their usage.
Today, even if the customer has a problem with WordPress hosting, with a plugin, with the installation of it, and so on, our team will help him. At LWS, we realized that the customer needs support at every stage. It is almost managed web hosting that we sell but at the price of normal hosting.
Because our spearhead is that we want our customers to be satisfied at all costs and that their project works. This is our guideline. If his project works, if there are no support or service failures, he will stay loyal to us.
In 2020, we have a lot more resources than we did at the beginning. A lot of things are redundant. We have few, if any, service failures. So we can really focus on customer satisfaction.
Our team is bigger. So we can offer better services.
The spearhead is to satisfy the customer, meet his demands and provide him with a turnkey service that meets his needs.
For example, we have 100% packaged products, such as WordPress, CMS Woocommerces…
What are your most popular products and services?
The most popular service at
is turnkey WordPress hosting.If a client wants to build a site, they use WordPress or another CMS. But it’s WordPress 9 times out of 10 with us.
Then they can create an eCommerce store with Woocommerce, which is also based on WordPress. Or with Prestashop. These are our flagship products.
At the beginning, the customer starts with shared hosting, and at the end, he ends up with a VPS server or several depending on the size of his site, or on Private Cloud servers, these are super VPS, based on dedicated servers. Because at LWS, the services evolve according to the needs of customers.
Keeping up with the competition is very important to retain customers, but also to attract new customers by offering better services and prices.
How is LWS different/better than its competitors?
The big American or French, European hosting companies use the cPanel control panel. Some have their own control panel, but most use cPanel.
It’s very rare that there are web hosting companies that, like us, offer both: cPanel and their own control panel.
Many people ask us why you offer your LWS Panel and cPanel control?
It’s very simple, cPanel is not for beginners. Our control panel fills this gap.
We don’t want to complicate our control panel for the needs of an experienced webmaster. For example, so that he can manage his PHP modules, his PHP versions in detail.
Everything is simplified on the LWS Panel control panel, whether it’s the management, the auto-installer. The auto-installer, for example, offers the 15 most popular programs. On cPanel, there are 230 programs. But you should know that among the 230, there are some programs that are not even used twice a year by all of our customers. So we have eliminated them from the LWS Panel.
Everything is simpler on the LWS Panel. To create emails, manage options, DKIM and other security configurations, everything is automatic. On cPanel, it’s also automatic, you might say, but you can disable it and break your cPanel account if you do anything wrong and if you don’t know anything about it.
So
offers both, and we optimize our services according to the customer’s needs.Compared to competitors, our difference is that we go beyond web hosting. As I said earlier, LWS specializes in web hosting of course. Other hosting companies specialize in telephony or other. We are hosting websites, but each time we create services in connection with the requests of customers that we have listened to. And so, we create adapted solutions for them.
For example, LWS had a lot of requests from SEOs, or bloggers, who wanted their WordPress site to be ultra-fast. It’s not quite the same solution to make a site fast in WordPress or without WordPress. So we created caching modules on the 3 software we sell the most: WordPress, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, and of course on specially optimized servers.
Also, some customers asked us to be able to advertise multiple IP addresses per the site they were hosting on a single account. So we created a specific module to do that. So, for example, if they have 3 sites hosted on the same package, they can advertise the 3 sites on different IPs.
For WordPress management, we have made a lot of modules to manage WordPress sites, clone modules, restore modules, and so on.
Of course, some competitors do it too. But LWS does it really turnkey, so it’s very simple for the customers. We worked with customers to develop the products.
First and foremost, LWS offers automatic backups on all services. Automatic backups are included with all our products at no extra cost.
LWS has also developed 30-day money-back guarantees. We consider that a customer can make a mistake in his purchase. And in one click, he is reimbursed by us. We are not afraid to do this, because we know that our products are good. And if they are not good, our team is constantly working on them to adapt them to the needs of the customers.
So no, we’re not afraid of being outdone by the competition or anything. And we don’t necessarily copy the competition. At LWS, we listen to our customers. Our customers talk to us all the time at customer support and we have internal processes that feedback their requests and needs. And so we simply make our services evolve in this way.
The web hosting industry is rapidly changing and there are many new trends.
How is LWS keeping up with these trends?
I don’t agree, web hosting is not evolving fast.
For 20 years the technologies have not evolved much frankly, it is still PHP, MySQL, and some programs on top. WordPress has been around for a long time.
On the other hand, it has become more professional. Everything is structured, now we have working methodologies that work, where the webmaster has a tool like WordPress or a site creator that is well standardized, a bit like the office suite tools of the past. Everything is standardized: PHP, databases, and CMS to make a website.
Afterward, what has evolved greatly is all the virtualization that is around, which allows resources to be allocated according to the client’s needs. Similarly, in terms of technology, we can back up everything on the fly, and nest everything. We can also use several data centers to host sites, protect them, and secure the customer’s data, so that they have disaster recovery plans, or very few breakdowns, and so that it is transparent for them. The technical side has become more professional. And for the customer, we have simplified his life and standardized his system.
Another thing I noticed is that for every.FR domain name registration, LWS offers free.SITE domain name registration. Can you tell us a little more about this and how you came up with this idea?
We have ongoing partnerships with all registries, as LWS is a domain name registrar.
is accredited on all the popular extensions that are sold right now.Depending on the partnerships we have, there are some that we propose and that are refused, there are others that the registries propose to us that we refuse or that we accept. This partnership, I don’t know who had the idea to be sincere, if it was the registry or if it was us.
But one thing is sure, it’s that the two of us worked together to develop the proposal, to know how we were going to propose it, in what form. It had to correspond to the customers and there had to be a demand from the customer. It had to be coherent.
Giving a .Site for the sake of giving a .Site is of no interest if it is of no use to customers.
In France, .Site means something, it’s a short name, it’s easy to remember. It’s an English name but in France .Site works well. So, it was a great idea.
The registry trusted us by giving us a partnership offer. And as it works, these offers have been extended from the original partnership agreement.
LWS, as you can see on our site, has some pretty aggressive offers commercially, but doesn’t do anything compared to other hosts that I won’t mention in the industry. We don’t want to sell a product that won’t serve customers.
We don’t want to sell a product that has a lot of power to make revenue but is not customer-friendly.
We want to sell a product that is customer-friendly, and that will meet one of their needs.
Therefore, all the offers that LWS makes are carefully studied beforehand, to know if there is a real benefit for the customers. Because our goal is not only to increase our turnover, it is to answer a need or to bring a bonus to the customers, so that he can also make his business evolve.
The next point I want to talk about is security and backup.
Many customers are also interested in data security and backup.
How do you handle this part?
This part, as I said before, has been anchored at
for several years. For several years, we have had a minimum backup system. At least once a day, with archives over several months, over several weeks for all customer data. They benefit from this at no extra cost. They can restore their data at any time. They can download it at home, and access it. This is native to LWS.For a few months now, especially since we had a colleague who had a data center that burned down. We thought that this could happen, even if it is never supposed to happen with the standards of data centers, at least those where LWS is. Normally this can’t happen, they have certified Datacenters, etc., normally this is not an option.
However, we have increased the security level of the backups.
Now we do the backups in several physical locations, several kilometers apart from each other. This is very, very expensive, to tell you the truth. Especially since we’ve done this without increasing the price of the offerings, and we’ve done this in a Covid period when hardware has pretty much exploded in price.
But this is one point where LWS does not back down because, for us, we do not play with customer data. It represents hours of work for them, it represents their customer book, it represents sometimes much more. Unfortunately, sometimes customers are very careless about their backups and so on. Because the deterioration of data can be due to material breakage, but also linked to negligence of the customer. If he has not updated his site or other, or he was hacked his site, his PC, or simply he is in dispute with one of his collaborators, someone has caused him a problem, etc. So for this part, we had already taken the lead a few months ago.
What are your plans and expectations for 2022?
For 2022, we are going to try to answer all the requests we have for web hosting.
Because of the global crisis of Covid, many need to create a side business of their physical activity in the web. To do this, they need a host, a reliable host, and that offers sustainable solutions.
So for
, the objective is to respond first to these requests, by guaranteeing the stability of our services. Indeed, this health crisis, it has changed our work organization, and at the same time increase our activity. So, we do not want to lose in quality of service.Then, our objective is to offer our services in English and in other currencies. We have delayed this project too much because of this pandemic. So this will be one of our top priorities.
What advice would you give to our readers about choosing the right hosting provider?
What should they look for and pay attention to when choosing the right hosting provider?
First, where is the data hosted?
Second, they are going to need a domain name. Never buy a domain name from someone who is not a registrar.
So if you want a web host that is not a domain name registrar, buy your domain name from a registrar and your web hosting from the host.
Indeed, domain names have very complicated legislation. In case of a dispute, you must have access to the accredited person right away.
Then, where is the head office of the web host? Who bills you? Because in case of a major problem or in case of a dispute again, you need to know who you are dealing with, which court of law you are going to trigger, which laws, etc.
Rely on customer reviews.
Concerning the reviews, there are hosts who don’t have negative reviews! Personally, I find it hard to believe. At LWS, even though we do everything possible, we refund people when they are not satisfied and everything, there are still customers that we can not satisfy. I have never seen a single company or service to date that manages to satisfy 100% of its customers. For me, this does not exist, or it means that there is no quantity of customers or that there is a problem.
So read the reviews carefully, especially on the comparator like HostAdvice. The system is quite well done, we can answer and so on. If there is no cheating on the requests for customer reviews and that it is real customers who put the reviews. So read the reviews well, and not only the positive ones, why he is happy, unhappy.
Read well the price of renewal rates.
Indeed, many hosts break the prices with minus 80 – 90% on the first purchase, but after the renewal is very expensive. For us, this is not the policy of LWS. We do not discount beyond 50%, but the renewal price is not beyond 50% either. We do not multiply the renewal prices by 8! For us, this does not make sense.
Read carefully if backups are included.
If you buy at a low price, but the backups cost more afterward than the service itself, it is of no interest.
Take a good look at the price difference between the first and second offers.
Since you shouldn’t dream about the first offer, a WordPress site may be running, but not very fast, so a customer will quickly switch to the second or third offer.
So check if the host has servers, look at the price and the offers of the servers. Look at all these points because if your needs change, your services must change with it.
Look at the cancellation conditions.
You never know. Some hosting companies commit their customers for years, even if they charge them monthly. This is not the case with LWS, you can be committed for 1 month, 1 year, and you can cancel at any time, without notice, without anything, with one click from the customer area.
So it’s true that we are under a lot of pressure because we know that if we don’t satisfy our customers, or if we don’t meet their expectations, they will leave. But this is our challenge and the challenge that we have given ourselves. To remain at the top and to do everything so that the customers are satisfied and that they do not leave.
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