Web hosting and design firm bitServe is celebrating its ten year anniversary in the hosting industry.

The company has been providing Web hosting services since February 1998. Today, bitServe hosts websites for over 500 businesses, some of which have been hosting with bitServe since the Web services' inception. Managing partner Mark Adams started the company in 1997 after researching domain name registration and realizing that it was a complicated process.

Adams first set up his own domain name reservation service, providing email and website forwarding for a one-time fee. After drawing hundreds of customers, he decided to expand the company's services by offering Web development services below cost to get customers onto the subscription hosting service.

"Not many businesses were on the Web at the time because it was so complicated to get started," says Mark Adams, the managing partner of bitServe. "We helped businesses reserve a domain name and use it for email until they had a chance to develop something further."