Now I have a lot of friends inside of the hosting industry, but not many of them in the file hosting business. With a new one coming up every single minute – it has to be a hard side of the web hosting fence to make a living at. I had a chance to talk with one of these digital cowboys in the business in question.

After covering File123.com on the Web Hosting Show, Matthew Dusig the CEO and Co-Founder got in touch with me. It’s not every day I get to pick a CEO’s brain and I was really interested in learning more. I tossed out the idea of asking him a few questions – and he gratefully accepted my offer.

The personal file and backup hosting services area seems a little crowed at best right now. Why make your mark there with File123.com?

If you compare File123 to all the other file and backup hosting services, you’ll see some major differences. Primarily, File123 focuses on helping people backup important paper documents, where none of the other services allow users to fax or scan in documents.

We’re focused on disaster preparedness. There are many important documents in a real-world file cabinet that will be destroyed in the event of a natural disaster. All the other services only help you to back up your hard drive.

What is your personal background in the hosting business?

My personal background is in the online industry, but not specifically hosting. I’ve built many successful online web systems since 1999 and understand the requirements of building scalable and redundant systems for storing data. Amazon S3 provides the storage hardware that services File123, which allows us to focus on new technology solutions to increase customer satisfaction.

Where do you see the most need for a service like yours?

Every night, when you get home from work you probably check you “real” mail. After you throw away the junk mail, what do you do with the other paper documents that you know you need to hold onto? File123 provides a digital solution for storing those real-world documents.

In addition to storing real-world documents, File123 OCR’s all documents (paper and digital) to make it easier to search for keywords within your documents. Also, File123 converts all documents into PDF files. If you upload a word document, you can immediately save your file as a PDF. File123 provides PDF conversion for free.

Where do you see yourself focusing in the future or are you more worried about the present right now?

There are many more services that File123 will offer in the future. I can’t discuss them all today, but File123 will continue to evolve into a very robust online application.

I want to thank Matt for taking the time out to talk with me here – and if any other CEOs are watching – your welcome too. Just drop me an e-mail. Here are just a few more good things about File123.com worth talking about.

File123.com Feature You Will Not See Anywhere Else:

PDF Conversion: File123 provides free PDF file conversion.

OCR (Optical Character Recognition): Search for text found within any image or document.

FAX / SCAN: Easily store paper documents.

EMAIL: Instead of emailing attachments from work to your gmail or yahoo account, email them to your personal File123 storage account.

USER INTERFACE: File123 provides a state-of-the-art Web 2.0 user interface that features drap ‘n drop for files and folders, large and small thumbnails of all your files, and customized folder design.

Need more information? Hear me talk about File123 on episode 119 of the Web Hosting Show podcast.

Give File123.com a shot. In a market where there is a lot of competition I think these guys stand tall and maybe even taller than some of the more popular choices out there. They have both free and paid options – so there is no reason to not at least sign up for that free 1GB of space.