What do you guys think is the best way to attract clients in a world where people are driving the cost of hosting into the dirt trying to compete? I have a ton of left over space on my server and I am going to be upgrading all of my equipment and getting another server. So what I would like to do is be able to resell the empty space, but do it in a way that will allow me to pay for server expenses. Whats a good way to start off finding clients? and what would you as a client be looking for in a hosting company? -Wrekoniz3
Compete on customer service and support. Offer your clients an experience they will keep coming back for.
You don't just "start off" in hosting. You create a business plan and become a legitimate business entity, like you would in any other industry. You study, you do research, you learn the trade, etc. Having some extra space left over on a server doesn't make you a host. Way too many kiddie hosts these days...
Before choosing a hosting package, a customer usually pays much attention to the following aspects: Price - as it is always important for a customer to buy a hosting plan which costs not much Discounts/promo - while choosing a package, the user always seeks for a discount or available promo codes which will provide him an opportunity to buy hosting for an affordable priice Disk space/bandwidth - most rookies want to have enough disk space and traffic in order to host their sites without any problems Money back guarantee - after ordering a package a beginner should be sure that the company will return him the money in case of the server problem Account activation time - costumers are eager to know how much time it takes to set up their account after they make an order on the site and pay for the hosting package. Free domain - as the customer starts its project, he/she will surely want to get it for free to save some money Scripts for site creation - when the user buys a hosting plan, he is usually not very familiar with site building and that is why this is fine when different scripts for site building are provided within the hosting package
And if you base your company on these concepts of what cheap hosts think customers want then you'll never be anything else but a cheap host. Newbies want these sort of things, people with a financial stake in their web site are much more interested in reliability, performance, backups, range of other business-friendly services like push email and collaboration tools (shared calendars, files, contacts, task, and notes), support that works and sorts things out, open communication, ancillary services designed to help them (good knowledgebase, tutorials, information), ease of use, and sometimes just gut-instinct in that they think they can work with these people and feel comfortable in trusting their online business to that hosting company. Only idiots, those who don't know any better, and those who think hosting is a generic service look for the cheapest price and the most amount of X for the smallest amount of money.
Everyone has made very good points, But to quickly get customers when your starting off, once everything is in order and ready for you to start selling, Go visit some local business in person and offer your services Than once you have enough customers that's its paying your costs and giving you a bit extra start to look online for your customers Only if you can handle more customers. But you should really do lots of research into it and make sure you know what your doing and not going to be around for just a few months or a year. Take in what everyone says. You can have lots of cheap paying customers or earn more by having less customers willing to pay for greats services. i.e 10 clients paying $2 a month earns you $20 or 5 clients paying you $6 a month earning you $30 a month. ( i just made these prices up as examples) if you go cheap you will gain and lose customers all the time and the other will give you a slower but more stable growth rate and more $$ in the long run. In my experiences any ways.
As you are new, you can provide one month trial for your hosting for clients to check your service and if it is good then they will definitely continue with your hosting.
Well...Thats what i am accounting for. I am not talking about a little server space left over on a crappy server. I want to turn my equipment self efficient. I have hosting experience from the past and i provide a few clients service now. I feel like this industry has changed SO much in the time I turned away to focus on other things. Its a very competitive and saturated market right now. I am trying to map out, and plan out how to get passed all of that. If a business plan points to a road block that business isn't worth investing money and sweat equity into. The kiddie hosts are driving costs dirt cheap, and trying to figure out how to compete with that is challenging. Thats why i'm asking.
I am looking for higher end clients. clients who don't mind paying $10 dollars a month for single domain hosting, and $20 for unlimited everything including server resources. So figuring out how to justify that over services which charge 1-5 dollars a month...
Thats a good idea but i would only do it with a credit card locked in, so after 30-31 days are up, it auto bills for the next month unless they cancel at the end. That might also help prevent people misusing the service for spam and all kinds of other fraudulent activities.
That's actually the easy part...you don't offer crappy services. You might not get business right away, especially if you are charging twice as much as the kiddie hosts, but eventually, people have such a horrible time with them that they leave and go elsewhere, usually realizing in the process that you get what you pay for. You shouldn't try to compete with them.
I don't think that people who are looking for cheap hosting in case they have a simple blog are idiots. They simply look for a place to host their simple site and they don't want to spend much money for this site and thus don't want to pay much. I agree with you, that the IT professionals who are planning to build a good and powerful site try to buy better services than shared hosting and look for different features which will make their site safe and secure.
That is right, the users ( who were not using hosting services previously) usually buy a shared hosting package and in case their site start growing and the visitors stats are getting higher day by day, it is better to upgrade to a VPS or dedicated server. If you don't do this in time, the support representatives may send you details regarding the server overload and they may suspend your account in this case if you don't perform any changes to your site configuration in order to decrease the server load.
I don't want to be accused of something while being misquoted so there is a need to clarify. I didn't say people who didn't want to pay much for their hosting were idiots - far from it. I said that those who look for the most amount of resources for the lowest price were idiots. There is a big difference between wanting everything for a few bucks with unrealistic expectations, and looking for a reasonable amount of resources in return for a lower price.
well yeah see the catch with a lot of these shared hosts who offer low prices is they limit your server resource usage. So they advertise unlimited everything but really cap how much resources you can take up. The average consumer doesn't know this and think they are getting a deal. So if you are looking to compete with that, would it be your responsibility to expose that and distinguish your hosting service from those who happen to omit important details?
A good Customer Services, Attractive plans (suitable for small to large scale organisations), stable servers, A attractive company website all these can make strong business. kingsizevps.com/ - King Size VPS | makeanysite.com/
Always give best customer support to your clients and make attractive plans and be stable once you started your hosting business because so many people run hosing business for one month if they do not get profit they just runway so do not do this thing always be stable.