Tony Medrano is the San Diego general manager of the Sorrento Mesa offices of InFlow Inc., a Denver Web hosting company.

InFlow stores companies' Web sites on its servers, which provide or serve up the Web pages over the Internet when individual computers request those pages.

Most people know that Web sites reside on something called a server, but what does the technology look like?

Some of our larger customers have literally hundreds of servers, row after row of large cabinets, 8 feet high. Each cabinet has a dozen or more servers. Many of our midsized companies have five to 20 servers, plus firewall and data-backup hardware. We have 12,000 square feet of equipment providing data and related services. It's basically a large, very clean warehouse with air conditioning coming up from the floor to keep the equipment cool.

There's been considerable shake-up and consolidation in the Web hosting industry. Has it stabilized?

For the past three years, there's been turmoil and pain in the industry. A lot of companies have been bought up or filed for bankruptcy. The problem was that a lot of companies looked at the projections for Web growth (during the tech boom) and built 200,000-square-foot data centers.

Then they couldn't fill them fast enough. I came to InFlow because they've survived that period.

Web hosting prices have dropped very low. Is there still a profit margin?

The cost for business infrastructure, the technology, has dropped. That's helped us, as an industry, reduce cost for customers. For some of the (discount) companies, the profit margin has eroded. For companies like ours that provide a more complex set of services, there is still a profit margin. The San Diego operation is profitable.

How is InFlow different from the companies that charge a few dollars a month to host a small site and from IBM, which hosts the largest sites?

Unlike the small company, we have $20 million in the bank. We're not going anywhere. You're not going to have to move your site to new servers every six months because the company went out of business. Unlike IBM and EDS, we're not going after the Fortune 50 companies. Our customers are the companies in the middle.

Have you ever built a Web page?

I think that when I was at Stanford, I had to build a page or two for a class. The tools were a lot harder to work with back then. I'm not a techie-turned-entrepreneur; I'm an entrepreneur-turned-geek. I was a naval officer who ran an engineering department. I have an MBA and a law degree. At Stanford, I co-taught a class on entrepreneurship. I'm not the guy you want in working with the technology, connecting the red wire to the white wire.

- JONATHAN SIDENER