We spoke with
Ivailo Ivanov, a
Support Supervisor at
ICDSoft, about their
100% dedication to their customers. Their system administrators work around the clock to еnsure the servers are always up and running 24/7 and equipping their hardware with the latest software versions, while their management, supervisors, programmers, web designers, account managers, and QA advisors collaborate to deliver the quality of service their customers deserve.
Can users register, purchase, and transfer domains through ICDSoft?
Users can not only purchase domains through us; they can do so at fair prices. At ICDSoft, we believe that domain names should be a commodity, so in 2019, we adopted what we call “Fair Pricing Policy for Domain Registrations.” We make no profit from the sale of domain registrations and anyone can purchase a domain at the same price it costs us to register it with the domain registrar. Our prices are clearly described and listed on our
domains page1.
Where available, we include free WHOIS privacy as well.
What Hosting plans do you offer?
We offer several types of hosting services – shared hosting, managed VPS, and reseller hosting. We also offer a generous 100-day money-back guarantee because we are confident in the quality of the service we provide.
Our shared hosting plans are unique in that they offer large amounts of disk space, free 12-hour backups, email services, and free SSL certificates.
We recently launched a great new solution – our SmartVPS product. It includes a fully managed VPS, allowing users to host an unlimited number of sites. It comes with a free web hosting management interface and free Control Panel for all its websites, including automatic 12-hour backups (kept for 14 days) which are not counted towards the disk quota of the VPS. Also included are dedicated CPU and RAM resources, which makes it a unique offering in the VPS hosting market.
What does your WordPress hosting include?
Our WordPress hosting plans rely on the same infrastructure as our general-purpose hosting services. Besides the additional server-side optimizations for running a WordPress site, we also offer a free WordPress Management Toolkit in the Control Panel of each hosting account. It allows clients to create staging installations, manage their WordPress users, change the site URL with a click of a button, copy/move WordPress sites, and apply different optimization and security adjustments. This is just the first version of our WordPress toolkit, and we are actively looking for feedback on areas where we can improve it and add additional functionality. This tool is available for free with all our hosting plans.
Do you provide hosting for any other CMS platforms?
WordPress is the most popular CMS out there – over 30% of all websites use it. Besides WordPress, we support the most popular CMSs – Drupal, Joomla, Magento, OpenCart, and MediaWiki. There are also many websites and custom software applications using Node.js. We support not only PHP/MySQL-based CMS platforms, but also Node.js, Python, Perl, and other popular systems.
Is SSL included with your hosting plans?
All hosting plans include free wildcard SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt. Users can also upload their own certificates through the Control Panel, as well as purchasing commercial SSL certificates from our website.
Do you have migration services for customers with existing web sites?
Yes, our team performs site migrations 24/7. Site migrations are really best performed by humans working for the new hosting company. We have seen users struggle with free and paid migration plugins, and the results are never satisfactory. The ICDSoft site migration team not only transfer websites but will configure them and resolve any problems. In fact, during migrations, we often come across broken functionality which we fix as part of the migration service, even if it had been broken at the previous host.
Are backup and recovery services available?
Backup and recovery are perhaps the most critical services a hosting provider can offer. We have built an enormous backup infrastructure for supporting our clients. Backups are automatically created every 12 hours and are available for restore via the hosting Control Panel. The backup servers at ICDSoft are redundant and use twin 10GbE connections to our production server network.
An aspect of the backup services, which worries a lot of our customers coming from other companies, is insurance against a failure of the hosting provider itself. At ICDSoft, customers do not need to worry as we are a company founded back in 2001 with a healthy balance sheet. You can find lots of reviews of our company’s services dating back to 2001-2002-2003. Most of the review posters are still clients!
Here are some stats complementing the statement above:
- The average age of accounts on ICDSoft servers is 2576 days – or seven years.
- The average lifespan of a website on the Internet is two years and seven months.
- The average company lifespan is ten years.
What are some of the features of your Professional Email Service?
Email is one of the essential features of our hosting plans. Many customers use us for email only because we provide a stable, cross-compatible, and universal email solution. We fully support the standard Internet email protocols and maintain a clean reputation for all our outgoing IP addresses. Our Incident Response Team monitors the email server queues, blacklists 24/7, and takes immediate action to resolve any service-related problems. At ICDSoft, we have a system allowing us to reroute emails to particular domains through custom email gateways, thus allowing us to bypass misconfigured or broken email servers/blacklists. A customer just needs to contact us with their issue, and it will be solved within 15 minutes.
How are your servers protected against hackers and other cyber threats?
We have over 300 production servers. That large number of servers cannot be kept safe without applying the best security practices, both internally in server setup and management protocols, and externally by securing the publicly accessible services. Our Network Operations Center (NOC) is staffed 24/7. We have both in-house and commercial software keeping watch over our infrastructure on three continents, and in the rare event when our technical staff has to take action, we do so within seconds of being notified.
Our servers run on the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) – a virtualization technology directly built into our Linux kernel (hardened with our own custom patches), turning it into a hypervisor that is as close to the real hardware as possible. The security of all users is ensured by account isolation achieved through a custom server setup with suEXEC and dynamic permissions control, which helps us fight some of the most extreme zero-day vulnerabilities in Apache and PHP.
We utilize an advanced Web Application Firewall (WAF) with thousands of custom rules in addition to an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to prevent millions of brute-force and exploit attempts daily. This powerful combination fights off aggressive attacks against all services that we provide (email, FTP, SSH, Control Panel, and web access), and it also “hides” common known vulnerabilities of popular web software. This not only helps protect all sites at all times, but it also saves on system resources such as CPU and MySQL minutes, ultimately allowing larger sites to run on smaller plans. A nice feature of our WAF is that users can choose to disable our WAF rules if they interfere with their applications.
What support services are available to your customers?
Excellent support at ICDSoft is really what makes our company tick. On average, the support technicians at ICDSoft have been with the company for over seven years. Maintaining such a highly qualified team of experts doesn’t come cheap, but the results speak for themselves. The average renewal rate of our company is over 85% and, in large part, this is due to our excellent support services.
Customers can contact us via the Live Chat on our website and through our ticketing system in their account panels. They can also contact us via email.
ICDSoft guarantees a response in 15 minutes but, in actuality, most tickets are resolved within 7. There is no priority support queue at ICDSoft. Every customer is important, and every ticket is processed with urgency. Additionally, each response is double-checked by a support supervisor to assure the client receives the best possible service.
