LeaseWeb

History

The company was founded in 1997 with one website, an online business directory. Client companies could add their contact details and a short description. The company started designing and building websites as an additional service, and opened an office in Utrecht in 1998. The company eventually focused solely on hosting services. The company was named LeaseWeb in 1999, and the first employees were hired that year.

LeaseWeb acquired its first own servers in 2000. The four servers had a total bandwidth of 512 kbit/s. LeaseWeb also moved to Amsterdam. The company owned 5,000 servers in 2005, and 10,000 two years later.

The company doubled its number of employees in two years to 50 by 2007. LeaseWeb moved to its current offices in the Amsterdam area and was also for the first time included in the Deloitte Technology Fast50. In 2009, the number of employees doubled again to 100. In 2010, the company had 25,000 servers. As of 2013 the company had over 300 employees and over 50,000 servers.

LeaseWeb's Netherland's datacenter is located at EvoSwitch AMS1: J.W. Lucasweg 35, 2031 BE Haarlem, Netherlands. This is their largest datacenter. This datacenter in the Waarderpolder in Haarlem hosts the Wikimedia Foundation's European hub as part of a €300,000 donation of in-kind support to the foundation.

LeaseWeb acquired the German hosting provider Netdirekt in 2010, and expanded its presence in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The acquisition allowed LeaseWeb to support its German customers in their own language from its datacenter in Frankfurt.

LeaseWeb expanded its operations to the United States in 2011 with the establishment of a subsidiary LeaseWeb USA Inc. It operates a datacenter in Manassas, Virginia,. The Manassas datacenter is at EvoSwitch WDC1: 9651 Hornbaker Rd, Manassas, VA 20109, this is mainly for its American customers .

On October 14, 2011, OCOM, LeaseWeb's parent company, was again listed in the Deloitte Fast 50. OCOM was the company with the highest revenue on the Deloitte Technology Fast50 2011 with a total turnover of €50 million (2010).

On October 7, 2011, LeaseWeb was chosen as HP Service Provider partner of the Year 2011. The best-performing HP partners in the Netherlands across various disciplines are presented awards.

LeaseWeb was one of the hosting providers of Megaupload. In January 2012, the servers were shut down after an international action coordinated by the FBI; after a year during which MegaUpload legal representatives attempted to secure the retrieval of user data, LeaseWeb deleted all data from the 690 servers. in what is called the biggest data loss in history.

On March 19, 2012, LeaseWeb announced its new public cloud platform. The company said that it could accommodate large numbers of customers, and provide a robust foundation for advanced Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) applications.

Anti-malware organization StopBadWare and LeaseWeb announced on April 19, 2012 that they would work jointly on cybercrime prevention. LeaseWeb sponsors StopBadware as a part of its Community Outreach Project.

As of June 2013 LeaseWeb offered a CDN (Content Delivery Network).

On December 17, 2013, LeaseWeb launched a Private Cloud platform, powered by Apache CloudStack.

March 2014, Leaseweb was ranked in the top 31 world's worst hosts and networks based on malicious traffic it hosts.

In mid-2014 LeaseWeb opened a data center in Singapore.

Business model

LeaseWeb provides its customers a single location where they can obtain a domain name, IP addresses, hardware, housing and bandwidth: a one-stop shop. Its infrastructure incorporates hardware, software and services from Cisco, Dell and HP.

Development

LeaseWeb's network has been IPv6-ready for years. The company provides IPv6 addresses to its customers without charge. The network is double-stacked, running both IPv6 and IPv4 on the same infrastructure.

LeaseWeb developed a cloud platform which it launched in March 2012. From 2012 it provided basic firewall functionality for all customers.

In June 2013, LeaseWeb launched its worldwide CDN (Content Delivery Network). It was built with open-source products from NGINX, used by more than 25% of the world's top 1,000 web sites with intensive traffic. NGINX uses LeaseWeb's infrastructure and recommends LeaseWeb services to its customers.

Corporate social responsibility

LeaseWeb was one of the first ISPs in the Netherlands to take measures against child pornography. The Spamhaus Project and Andrew Martin's security blog show that LeaseWeb routinely host spammers and botnet controls.

Through its Community Outreach Project, LeaseWeb offers free hosting to organizations that monitor, identify and combat the sources of spam and cybercrime.

Network and datacenters

The company operates eight datacenters in Europe, Asia and the United States. LeaseWeb peers with Internet exchanges in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, New York City, Brussels, Stockholm, Madrid, Zurich, Düsseldorf, Paris, Warsaw, Budapest, Milan, Vienna, Prague, Luxembourg, Bucharest, Bratislava, Copenhagen, Oslo, Ashburn, Miami, Chicago, Dallas, Palo Alto and Los Angeles. LeaseWeb's network consists of 55 Points-of-Presence and 33 Internet Exchanges across the globe. The network has a bandwidth capacity of 5.0 Tbit/s with peak traffic about 2.5 Tbit/s and reports uptime of 99.9999%