DALLAS/EWORLDWIRE/Feb. 18, 2004 --- Combining the love of speed, the admiration of young entrepreneurship and a flair for bold marketing, C I Host has become the main sponsor of Cristiano Piquet, a Brazilian who has been winning auto races since he was 16 years old."He is young and starting out and I like his entrepreneur spirit and his 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' ideology," said Christopher Faulkner, CEO of C I Host. "His racing appeals to our target market of 25 to 54 year old men."
Faulkner and Piquet are natural partners due to their youthful accomplishments.
Faulkner founded C I Host as a teenager in his college dorm room. It quickly was ranked one of the top five Web hosting firms in the world and now has 205,000 customers in more than 180 countries.
Piquet began amateur Kart racing when he was 16 and won all the local races. By the time he was 19, Piquet had won three of the most important professional Kart championships in Brazil in the Shifter category.
Piquet and C I Host also share the qualities of speed, a global reach and a competitive spirit that makes them winners in their fields.
After 10 years of competition in Karts, Rally and Monoposts (Formula Cars), Piquet made his debut in Sports Cars in 2002, when he was invited to become part of the daring Lamborghini GTR Project for the American Le Mans. As the project's official driver, he made the transition from formula cars to sports cars.
C I Host has expanded consistently over the past seven years, growing the thriving even while the recent economic downturn forced other Web hosts and IT companies to cut back or fold their tents.
"Cristiano is a winner, C I Host is a winner and we want all our customers to be winners," Faulkner said. "Our network is one of the fastest and most reliable in the industry, and that's just what you want in a race car - speed and reliability."
About C I Host
C I Host (www.cihost.com), based in the Dallas/Fort Worth market, is a Web hosting and Internet solutions provider, domain name registrar (DNR) and application service provider (ASP) serving 205,000 individual consumers and businesses in 182 countries worldwide.
C I Host creates business-class Web hosting solutions for the small- and medium-enterprise (SME) market, with the broadest portfolio of managed hosting and value-added services in the industry. C I Host is accredited by ICANN to register domain names.
C I Host is HIPAA-compliant and has passed the SAS70 audit.
C I Host has been ranked #1 in speed by the Adoloma Web Hosting Guide. C I Host has been consistently ranked among the Top 5 Web hosting companies out of 16,000 around the globe by c|net's Ultimate Web Host List, HostPulse, WebHostsOnline.com and HostChart.com. C I Host was named among the Top 25 Web hosting companies by HostIndex.com.
C I Host offers turn-key services ranging from initial domain name registration to custom dedicated servers for e-commerce on today's Web. The company offers innovative packages and services to the Internet community.
C I Host operates three diverse data centers across the United States, with its main facility and Network Operations Center in Bedford, Texas. C I Host also has offices in Los Angeles, Chicago and London.
All telco-grade, tier-1 data centers are wholly owned and operated by C I Host and consist of redundant diesel generator backups and a temperature-controlled secure environment with fully redundant UPS capability. All server hardware is fully tested and configured for optimal performance. Daily Web server backups and full fire protection guard against any data loss. To deliver speed and reliability, C I Host's servers are connected to two OC-12 fiber connections, five DS-3 and two OC-3 lines from five diverse Internet backbones for a total of more than 2.6 Gigabits of available bandwidth.