Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Differentiating Hosting

You can offer the Best Service or you can be a discounter - you can't be both. If you want to be a Discounter, you can not afford to provide support. Be like NetZero or IX Hosting and offer email or IM support only. (Average support call takes 6 minutes and costs $30).

Chase a Niche market like Cold Fusion, ASP, .NET, or blogging.

Customers don't know what Hosting is. Hosting, Web Presence, Web design, graphic design are all the same concept to most business owners. Attendors are newbies; Switchers are people already with a website. Who are you targeting?

Make sure that when you bill an end user that the referral agent explains that your ISP will be charging his credit card to avoid charge-backs. Your contract should state that affiliates can contact them. Have 2 brands - Premium and Discount.

Upsell your dial-up or BB clients a hosting account. Upsell SEO, design, and traffic. Upsell managed email, dedicated hosting, e-commerce, calendaring.

There are 8M business with 2-25 people. 60% have websites. 44% of these sites are hosted by ISPs. To target the other 40% is really sales, not marketing. The marketing will be off-line using advertsing in trade publications to target verticals as well as using sales forces for design shops / graphic artists and local coupon magazines.

Hostopia mention using a starter kit with missionary work, website templates, registration, etc. And to put these starter CD's at PC shops. Jack Brandt of Register.com says that they are currently working on this idea. GET THERE FIRST!

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