Marketing a website hosting company

Okay, so I know this is a well-debated question and there's no *real* answer. But I'm not looking for answers myself. I'm just interested to know how others approach this.

I've had quite a few website hosting companies in my time. I usually started them all off making big sacrifices and losses, like dumping a lot into advertisement, offering discounted hosting for many months and also offering free domains with every package.

Just interested to see f anyone else on this forum can provide any real experience on marketing their website hosting business and see where they failed or succeeded?

 

Hi there. I do not have my own website hosting companies but I know some people who do. She does not invest any amount on paid advertising and does the promotion via social media and word of mouth which is for free. I think it is best to start off on free promotions while the business grows instead of starting off spending a lot on promotions and advertisements and ending up losing a lot in the end. With big and popular companies as competition, it is always best to stay low-key on paid promotions and focus on free ways of promoting the business instead.

 

I am doing SEO for my hosting site and im on top for a few keywords right now, but traffic is low and there is not much conversion at the moment.
I had a lot of success with reddit/r/webhosting though, most of my paying customers are from there.

 

That's interesting, I never thought of Reddit being a good advertising tool for website hosting.

And I don't feel as if there is enough reach with social media when you're small. I still use Facebook, Twitter and so on, but I find it doesn't convert as well as paid advertising. I get the money back all of the time, so it's kind of worth the gamble

 

Start small and find an angle, maybe target small businesses who don't have websites.
What about mobile hosting? you could offer a free mobile site with a years hosting or something.

 

One mistake that a lot of hosting businesses do:
DO NOT undercharge and try to be the cheapest around, figure out your costs, and a realistic "customers per month" number divide that number by your costs and add your profit margin, then divide it by 12 and that is how much your customers need to pay on average.

 

I don't have any experience with marketing a web site hosting company, but I will tell you that as with any website it's all about hard work (grinding hard, every day) and FOCUS. You have to put in the work and spread the word as far and wide as possible if you want to succeed.