Netfirms was founded in 1998 by two students at the York University in Toronto, Ontario: Thomas Savundra and Suhan Shan. The pair are still in control at Netfirms today, as President and Director, respectively.

Company and Services
Netfirms started out offering the first ad-supported free web hosting solution and was an instant success.

The offer of free hosting enabled the company to expand its customer base quickly and by 2001, the size of its staff forced Netfirms to relocate to larger premises, in Buffalo, New York. In 2005 Netfirms moved across the border in to Canada when it launched sister company Netfirms.ca. Today, Netfirms hosts around 1.2 million websites, and has more than 800,000 customers worldwide. The business has one office in Markham, Ontario (outside Toronto) and another in Buffalo, New York.

Netfirms offers a wide range of hosting packages, as well as online marketing services, domain registration, e-commerce solutions and bespoke website design. Currently there are three types of shared hosting available. The largest of these, the “Business Plan”, has 300GB of storage space and runs on both Linux and Windows. The other two plans only run on Linux. Each package comes with lots of useful features, such as free blogging with WordPress and statistics with HitCounters. As part of its customer value proposition, Netfirms offers a 30 day money back guarantee and 24/7 customer support via email, telephone and live online chat.

Netfirms has been somewhat of a pioneer in the web hosting industry. Back in 2001 it was among the first web hosts to use clustered server technology, which is designed to bring greater reliability by spreading the load among a network of servers.

In 2007 the company went ‘green’ and claims to be dramatically reducing the daily consumption of energy throughout its business. Finally, with the launch of ‘Netfirms Multi-Platform’ in 2007, Netfirms was the first host to introduce an integrated Windows/Linux platform.

Netfirms has been highly rated by web professionals, everyday customers and the business media. It has regularly won awards for its customer service, reliability and for its easy-to-use products. In 2003 it was voted ‘Best Web Host for Small Business’ by 100 Best Web Hosting, and was the ‘Number One Reseller Web Host’ by Web Host Directory. In both 2006 and 2007 Netfirms was recognized as one of ‘Fastest Growing Companies’ by PROFIT 100.

Server Location
All of Netfirms' servers are in a data center in California, USA.

Related Links
Knowledge base: http://support.netfirms.com/
Support: http://support.netfirms.com/
Company news:
Green: http://www.netfirms.com/company/green/