ICDSoft is a low-cost hosting company and comprehensive website builder. Keeping over 56,000 websites up and running, ICDSoft has an outstanding industry reputation and an “Excellent” Trustpilot rating.
I reached out to Ivailo Ivanov, a customer support agent who has been with the company since 2005, to ask him some questions about ICDSoft.
Experienced In The Hosting Industry
The CEO and founder of ICDSoft has been involved in hosting websites since the early 2000s. Ivailo told me all about the beginning of the company and why the CEO chose this particular business venture:
“We started as a development company. Our CEO Dimitar Dimitrov had a few sites related to his development work which needed hosting. Back in the early 2000s, the hosting industry was very immature and most providers offered hosting as a side service, not their main offering. The company our CEO used asked for a one-time fee of $200 for a hosting account with a Control Panel (a luxury in the year 2000). They even had a reseller package, with a 50% discount for ten accounts. Since our CEO had six websites at that time, he chose the reseller package, and resold the extra 4 accounts. When his new customers started asking for more accounts, initially he answered that this was all that he had, and web hosting wasn’t his main line of business. However, customers were in awe of his hard work and dedication to answering their requests the minute they came, so they kept asking, and he decided to go ahead with this business venture.
There was one problem with the service though – as a reseller, Dimitar depended on his provider and their level of service. He used to respond to customer emails within minutes but, whenever an issue required the response of his provider, it would take them one or two business days to respond. It was a weak link in his business plan that needed to be solved. This, along with other issues he had with his provider, really bothered him, and he decided to build a complete hosting company, all by himself. In a few days, he was able to purchase a server and some collocation space in the near data center, and migrate his customers to his own server. In 2001 he hired his first workers, and by 2002 we had over 25,000 customers”.
An Amazing Customer Experience
The team at ICDSoft prioritise creating an “amazing” experience for their customers and this shows in the hundreds of positive reviews on Trustpilot. Furthermore, you will find lots of testimonials on the ICDSoft website from very happy customers.
Ivailo explained how the company ensures all their customers receive an outstanding experience:
“Providing amazing customer experience has always been one of our top priorities. It may sound like a cliché, but this is one of the foundations on which our company was built. When our CEO started selling web hosting services, customers’ expectations for support were pretty low – they expected that their mails and tickets would be answered in a day or two. This was in stark contrast with the plan of our CEO, who believed that each customer request should be answered immediately. This is the reason why we consider the support team at ICDSoft one of our greatest assets. In most companies, Customer Support is an entry level position, and rarely someone stays on it for more than a couple of years. At ICDSoft, Customer Support members are some of the most respected and experienced professionals working for the company”.
Ivailo went on to tell me how he considers customer support to be ICDSoft’s greatest strength:
“It must be the level of service and customer support we provide. One of the greatest fears of any hosting provider is loss of customer data. That’s why at ICDSoft we spare no expense or effort on building and maintaining backup systems to ensure that all customer data is safe. Backups are included for free with all our hosting plans (even the cheapest ones), and restores are as easy as clicking a button.
We also do our best to go the extra mile so that each customer may feel special, regardless of the amount of money they pay for their service with us”.
Company Culture
I asked Ivailo what one single aspect of ICDSoft he is most proud of. Here’s what he told me:
“It is the company culture that is built around our core company values – customer satisfaction, excellent level of support service, uptime and data safety. Our company is happy to provide all workers with two months of annual paid leave, competitive pay rates, and many other benefits, which in our view is a requirement for a healthy company environment that can respond to all customer requests. It is the belief of our CEO that a team that is happy is bound to make its customers happy”.
A Best-Selling Service
ICDSoft has four different hosting options to choose from. However, there is one option in particular that outperforms the others in terms of popularity; shared web hosting. Ivailo told me a little bit about this:
“The Economy and Business shared hosting plans (https://www.icdsoft.com/en/hosting/shared) have been the mainstay of our company. Both plans provide a very generous amount of disk space (10 GB for the Economy plan and 100 GB for the Business plan), with included backups, free SSL certificates, performance optimizations, and an easy-to-use Control Panel, at a very competitive price”.
The Economy plan is normally priced at $8.00 per month with a $6.40 per month renewal cost. Shared hosting customers will receive 10GB storage, 500GB per month data transfer, and 100 CPU minutes per day.
The Business plan, normally costing $10.00 per month with a $8/month renewal cost, is even better value for money. Customers will enjoy 100GB storage, 5,000GB data transfer and 150 CPU minutes per day.
Furthermore, all customers receive free SSL certificates, 100 day money-back guarantee, social media backup service – SocialSync, and access to ICDSoft’s comprehensive website builder.
Even more still, ICDSoft is currently running a very generous offer to help more businesses move online. At the time of writing this, businesses can get a huge 75% off their hosting. This means that the Economy plan is currently only $2.00/month while the Business plan is only $2.50/month. I think this is a fantastic hosting option for small businesses in particular to take advantage of.
Expanding Its Offerings
The ICDSoft team has some big plans to expand their services even further. Ivailo told me more about this and what customers can expect in the future:
“In the last couple of years, we have been working hard to expand our offerings from shared hosting accounts to managed VPS services and managed application services. We recently launched a highly competitive VPS plan – SmartVPS, that includes server monitoring, backups, multidomain features, Control Panel, all running on top hardware for as low as $19/month.
We also recently launched a brand-new Website Builder, which is included for free with all shared hosting plans, making launching a new website a breeze.
We are now looking into expanding our WordPress management toolkit into a fully-featured managed WordPress service”.
Finally, I would like to thank Ivailo for taking the time to answer my questions. I think that ICDSoft is doing a remarkable job at assisting businesses by keeping their costs low. I’ve been really impressed by the overwhelmingly positive reviews of the company, as well as the very special 75% discount that is currently running.