Montreal Tech Watch

iWeb is virtually unknown by Montrealers, although they get covered by Canadian English, American and European media. They were ranked in 2006 as Canada’s 2nd fasted growing company. But there was no line about it in the news, as local media always prefer huge (and monolithic) companies.

I noticed them last month when they received a 4.5M$ investment from Development Bank of Canada, then again 1M$ from Bank of Montreal. I got then to talk yesterday to Eric Chouinard, CEO of iWeb.

First, you have to know that out of 100 web hosting companies out there, 90% are resellers, and 9% are co-locating in a data center. iWeb is among the 1% of web hosting companies who own their own servers and data centers. iWeb’s data centers provide voip hosting to telcos like videotron, streaming media, back-up, outsourcing and of course web hosting solutions.

I asked Eric if he plans to double again his company’s size in 2007 and what are the limits. Well, he believes that we are currently going through a ‘digital’ revolution, with personal, corporate and governemental data transferred to data centers, instead of keeping them in local hard drives. Applications are going web and browser-based; video, audio and voip speed up the revolution.

To have a better grasp of iWeb, here are some quick numbers:

• iWeb is Canada’s biggest hosting provider
• Their growing rate was 100% in 2006, with a loss of just 3.5% of new customers
• 80% of the customers are outside Canada, in 140 countries
• They have a capacity of 6.000 servers, wich will be upgraded to a total of 14.000 servers in the upcoming months
• They guarantee the lowest price, knowing that Quebec provides one the cheapest electricity worldwide
• They are also ranked regularly as the most reliable web hosting companies in the world

This is very impressive. If I have to criticize iWeb, it is their lack of presence in Montreal and in Québec. They are a fine example of local sucess and entrepreneurship. When I recently had to get a server, I looked for local companies, wasn’t convinced and went to an american web hosting provider instead.

Final words from Eric Chouinard to tech entrepreneurs; “Never allow to be discouraged by someone else. Go on.”. Back in 1994, when he was still a student at UQAM, he was already convinced that the Internet was the future, but many people said to him it was a joke. He and Martin Leclair continued and they have now annual revenues of 5.7M$, doubling each year.

Photos and video below

Eric Chouinard is co-founder and CEO of iWeb

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