The countdown to our 10th birthday begins! – MD looks back.

On February 2nd 2010 it will be LCN’s 10th birthday!

I really can’t believe how quickly 10 years has (almost) passed. It only just seems like yesterday that LCN was started, or LowCostNames.co.uk as it was originally known back then.

It’s quite funny when I look back on how it all begun; there has certainly been lots of blood, sweat and tears along the way but so many fond memories also. You can even check out our original website here (please don’t laugh, we thought it looked good at the time!).

We’re very proud to reach this milestone and to celebrate this achievement we will be offering 10 crazy offers for the 10 weeks leading up to our birthday.

The first of these offers starts next week on the 1st of December, so keep a look out for our first announcement or even better follow us on twitter and we’ll keep you informed.

The Journey So Far….

Our roots have always been in Hertfordshire and in early 2000 we established our first office in Hoddesdon which was located above a Snooker Club in the town centre. These rented offices were pretty shabby and the decor was not much to be desired, but they certainly fulfilled their purpose of providing us with cheap office space to get us started. They were certainly a far cry from our current offices in Stevenage which have all the latest mod cons, but I still look back with fond memories of our time there.

To house our customers websites we initially rented a couple of Sun Cobalt Raq3 servers, which were based in Redbus data centre in Docklands, London. We also became Nominet members so we could offer our customers the very best prices on domain names. By end of 2001 we had quickly established ourselves as leading provider of domain names and web hosting services in the UK. We also gained an excellent reputation for providing a high standard for customer service, this is something which our business has been built on and to this day is one of our highest priorities.

In 2002 we decided to take the plunge and invest in renting some colocation space of our own in Docklands (pretty much the only place you could get colo at the time) , this would allow us to purchase our own hardware and build bespoke systems to host our customers websites. At this point we also decided to establish a London office in Docklands, where initially a few staff were based to install and service our equipment.

In 2003 we became one of only a handful of ICANN accredited UK companies.

Due to our continued expansion, in 2004 we purchased a brand new 4000sq ft office unit on a small business park in Hoddesdon. This gave us room for continued growth and allowed us to create an environment for our staff where they could excel in their jobs. We also expanded our London presence by renting a larger 1000sq ft office space and this office became our main development centre, where we recruited around 10 developers and systems administrators.

Over the next few years we expanded our product portfolio to include many additional features and continued to build on our established reputation. ServerChoice.com was also formed as a sister company to provide the next step for our share hosting customers by providing virtual servers and dedicated servers.

In 2008 due to the mounting cost of maintaining two offices and also the vast increases in colocation costs in London, we decided to purchase a 12,000sq ft premises in Stevenage, Hertfordshire and combine all of our staff from our existing offices into one single location. Also as part of this move we decided to build our own data centre to house all of our servers, as it was felt that this would put us firmly in control of our own destiny and costs going forward. Our data centre is amongst some of the most advanced data centre’s in the UK and we are particularly proud of it. To find out more about our data centre you can visit our dedicated site at www.ai-datacentre.co.uk.

Fast forward to today and we now have over 200,000 customers and hold over 350,000 domain names, firmly establishing us as one of the leading providers of domain names and web hosting the UK. It’s amazing to think we started with zero investment and just a small bank overdraft to get us going and now we are the UK’s largest organically grown domain name and web hosting company. Our success can be attributed to many contributing factors, but none more so than our staff’s hard work and commitment to offer our customers the very best service possible. We have very strong ideas on how our business should be run and how we mold our employees into a mindset to not only meet our customers expectations, but to also regularly surpass them.

You can read more about our company’s mission statement, vision and values by clicking here.

More from me next week…