A Message From The CEO

Over the last 10 years I have seen and helped thousands of businesses grow, improve and profit. I have seen start ups go to million dollar companies using our web hosting and ecommerce solutions. AIT began as a grass roots movement. Our company culture, core values and technology were built from the ground up and forged on the basis of putting the customer first. I am always amazed at the ingenuity of entrepreneurs from selling health products, collectibles, motorcycles and real estate to providing dating, gaming and financial services. I have seen our business customers go from small brick and mortar storefronts to selling their products and services worldwide. We also offer private label hosting solutions for large companies, ISP clients and Resellers of every sort. I have four children and when they ask me what it is that I do, I tell them I have the best job in the world -helping people prosper and benefit from the Internet. When the press asks me how did AIT manage to survive and even prosper during the dot com bust, I tell them we didn't notice any downturn because we were too busy helping our customers. Finally, when people ask me "what's a web site" I tell them it is a combination of a 1-800 number, yellow pages ad, TV and radio commercial, customer service center and cash register all rolled into one. All of our web hosting features and tools were built to drive business for our customers. So, let us help you.

Welcome to AIT

Welcome to AIT, home to over 210,000 web sites to include Fortune 500 companies as well as home businesses. AIT was founded as a garage start up in North Carolina and has grown to a two-time INC 500, multimillion dollar web hosting and technology company. From a two-car garage to a 93,000 Square foot data center, AIT has always been entrepreneurial and customer-centric. Small businesses to larger clients like Time Warner, Microsoft, Newsweek, U.S. Federal Government, PC World, United Nations, Business Week, State of North Carolina, Department of Defense, Wall Street Journal, ZD net, Pizza Hut, Goodyear, Smart Money, Discover Radio, and many more have benefited from AIT's products and services. You have my word that your business is my first priority - period. My team and I are fanatical about customer service and you can always count on us twenty-four hours a day, every day all year long.
Clarence Briggs, CEO

AIT Core Values

• Customer Service: We exist to provide heroic customer service to our clients by helping them grow, improve and profit with superior quality and value - everything else is secondary.
• Constant Innovation: We will not kill a new idea with cynicism but will fanatically defend our innovative right to swim upstream toward the source of creativity - away from the riptide of dogma and conventional wisdom.
• Employee Commitment: We are a partnership of employees who are the source of strength to AIT and each individual is important enough to have a voice and to be treated with absolute respect and dignity.
• Excellence Always: We will pursue unequivocal excellence in all aspects of the company, set standards and attain every higher goals, meet all challenges, and work with passion, commitment, and enthusiasm.
• Continuous Self-Renewal: We will continually re-invent ourselves and improve all that the company does in customer satisfaction and productivity, and endeavor to seek self-improvement relentlessly by striving to do the impossible.

The AIT Story

1996 – A 30-ish Army Officer and Paratrooper with a surgically reconstructed knee, facing the prospect of finishing his military career riding a desk. Having jumped into battle in Panama and marched through the desert in Gulf War I, that prospect is wholly unsatisfying.

2007 – A 40-ish businessman leads a $50-million a year enterprise into the twenty-first century.

In between is the story of how AIT grew from a garage into a 93,000 square foot operations center that services nearly 200,000 business domains worldwide. With AIT's help, thousands of entrepreneurs are reaching the millions of consumers who spend billions of dollars online every year. What does that mean to you? It means opportunity. As more people take their businesses online, either in addition to physical storefronts or as digital-only shops, they share a common need - technology. Who is going to make sure their web sites work? More importantly, who is going to host those sites?

When AIT was founded in 1996, it was with an eye to answering that question; more specifically, to create the means through which this company could open what was a fledgling enterprise known then as the World Wide Web to the mass market. The Internet was in its infancy as a business tool at the time, but all the research pointed to a big upside. What my associates and I lacked in business experience, we made up in persistence and a desire to learn, and by incorporating the leadership and managerial skills learned in countless military exercises along with real-world missions in Panama and the Persian Gulf.

A handful of us worked out of my garage, pulling Army duty by day and searching for an Internet niche by night. In the beginning, AIT was itself a reseller of another provider’s services, and I remember well the frustration of waiting for someone – anyone – to fix our problem, or to even acknowledge that they were aware a problem existed. There had to be a better way. AIT’s track record says we found it. The company went through steady growth during the late 90’s, survived the fallout of the dotcom bust, and resumed growing as the Internet gained mass appeal. A key component, perhaps the key component, of AIT’s success has been the focus on the Value-Added Reseller, or VAR, as the cornerstone of the customer base.

Entrepreneurs around the world have taken advantage of the AIT formula to run businesses using little more than a PC and a dial-up connection. AIT’s approach has revolved around a three-pronged approach that amounts to us, if you’ll pardon the expression, giving a DAM. Actually, D-A-M is an acronym; after 12 years of practically speaking in acronyms in the Army, it’s become a habit. Here’s how this principle has worked in giving resellers what they need in order to achieve success:

• Diversity of the product line. Simply look at our Compare Plans and Prices page on the web site, http://ait.com/compareplanspricing.php. VARs can resell any or all of the items included in this list, many of which AIT provides at no charge. It is up to the individual to determine the packages his or her business will offer within the range of the five primary product bundles: hosting, domain registration, e-commerce, Internet access, and additional business services.
• Anonymity so that AIT’s involvement is transparent. For VARs to be successful, they must be perceived as their customers’ service provider; that is the only way for this partner relationship to work. Every AIT product and service can be sold as the reseller’s own. AIT is among the very few hosting companies that offer this white-labeling. Our job remains to service the VAR, but we do not interfere with the VAR’s customers.
• Margin to allow for recurring profit. Since AIT has built most of the product and applications offered to our resellers, we can offer those services for free. This includes shopping carts, billing software, secure directories, database managers, and much more. Take our proprietary shopping cart, or web store, for instance. Hundreds of resellers have taken this free product and sold it to their customers for hundreds of dollars. Extend that across the AIT product line and you can see the potential for building a business with steady income.

Since nothing sells quite like success, our reseller channel has become the evangelists of AIT, telling colleagues about the opportunities that could stem from partnering with this ‘group of ex-soldiers in North Carolina’.

When a business reaches a certain level of success, there is often a tendency to romanticize the past. Let me tell you, there's nothing romantic about midnight phone calls from irate customers who don't care if the problem is your service provider's fault, and there is nothing glamorous about battling a hurricane as it bears down on your data center. Advanced Internet Technologies was built as a direct result of the issues we confronted during the garage days when we were standing where you are now: working to find new customers while also keeping the ones you have.

Today, the Internet and e-commerce are mainstream; online sales are going up, and even traditional purchases are preceded by Internet research. The web sites that AIT hosts now, and the ones that our resellers host, are vital components of the businesses housed in our server farm. "That's just great, Clarence," you say, "but why does that matter to me?"

Did you know that….millions of small businesses across the country, no doubt including your community, are not on the Internet? And, this is despite the billions of dollars in online sales.

If you know just a little bit about technology and have an appreciation for providing good customer service, you can be an Internet entrepreneur, reselling web hosting and other services. The AIT Reseller Program is geared to creating opportunity for individuals who want to channel their strengths and talents into the unique medium. It works regardless of your level of technical knowledge. In fact, the key to doing this has nothing to do with technology at all.

Businesses are not going online so they can spend their time troubleshooting technical issues. That's what they expect from their provider, and as I learned by being a reseller, that's also what a reseller expects from their provider. Problems will occur as they do in every business; how you handle issues will determine your reputation.

Here again, AIT's practices and policies were formed of our own experiences. That's why the support staff is on the job 24 hours a day, available through an online ticket system and toll-free by telephone. We've built, and continue adding to, a customer service library that gives you the means of resolving minor problems. We've created product demos and tutorials so customers can understand the value of new services being offered.

To me, the best part of building AIT was this company's ability to provide the tools that give others the chance to do what we did. I'm not going to lie to you and say that it's easy; it isn't. There were numerous challenges and obstacles along the way, but that is true of any new venture. The difference here is that AIT can truly say that we have been where you are, we understand what you're going through, and we see where you want to go. Our mission is to help you get there.