A 5-year-old local Web hosting company in Ann Arbor is expecting 40 percent revenue growth this year and is hiring.

 

A2 Hosting Inc. was founded by current owner Bryan Muthig and a since-bought-out partner in 2003, just six years after Muthig graduated from Ann Arbor Pioneer High School.

 

After high school, Muthig attended Michigan Technological University in Houghton for three semesters in electrical engineering, then came back to the Detroit area to work as a contract Unix system administrator for Ford Motor Co. After that he spent five years in a similar role at MCI Worldcom.

 

"Computers have been my hobby since I was 12 years old, and I've been playing around with Unix since I was 14," Muthig said. "I started the company with a friend of mine on the side, as a hobby, just hosting for friends and family. Eventually it got to the point where we put up a Web site and started actually getting some business."

 

The business got big enough to allow Muthig to leave MCI and work at A2 full-time in 2005, and he bought out his former partner in 2006. The company currently has 15 employees and has two openings currently for support analysts. It hosts 30,000 domains now, from around the world.

 

Muthig said his company has made its mark by supporting the latest and greatest in Unix-Linux technologies -- being one of the first, for example, to support version 5 of PHP, an open source script-based programming language that can be used to manage dynamic Web content. The company has also worked extensively in search engine optimization.

 

Muthig said the company is decentralized, with many employees telecommuting a few days a week, and its actual hosting equipment at a colocation provider in Southfield.

 

"Two primary things I think set us apart currently," Muthig said. "One is that we still keep on the cutting edge versions of the software platform that we support -- PHP, mySQL, Linux, Apache. A lot of hosting companies don't keep up with the current versions, but developers want the latest and greatest available.

 

"The second thing would be customer service. The hosting industry is pretty well known for a lackadaisical support structure ... We do a much better job than that. We have a pretty good screening process for the folks we hire to make sure they area actually techniallyk adept and will be able to help you, they are not just reading from a script."

 

The company also buys carbon offsets for its carbon footprint, and is moving into virtual private server offerings, which offer the security and flexibility of a separate server at a fraction of the usual cost. Even though they may share a machine, the virtual private server allows its own unique operating system, memory, disk space and full root access, as if it was separate machine. That service starts at $14.95 a month.

 

The company's services start at $4.95 a month for a three year prepaid plan. The most popular plan is executive shared hosting, which is $7.95 a month with a year prepaid. That service offers unlimited disk space and data transfer.

 

The company could soon have 20 to 25 employees, Muthig said, because it's looking into adding related tech services such as Web design and application development.

 

More -- including a whole raft of glowing customer testimonials -- at www.a2hosting.com.