Hello DP, What are your thoughts on me offering 1 penny web hosting for your first month? Is this a good business move to make? Jordan
Seems like a good idea to get people through the door and then gain monthly/yearly subscriptions. Someone posted another thread about Hostgator offering $0.01 hosting via a code to achieve pretty much the same thing. Making it a limited quantity deal could help generate a bit more hype too I think - for example tying it to the first 100 customers, or making it a 72 hour deal... or something of that nature. If you plan on marketing this offer through various avenues it would provide a sense of urgency which could lead to faster results maybe.
I would also be weary of sign up accounts that will just use your web hosting to spam or create phishing websites. - Even though you have this issue with normal paid accounts, the volume could possibly increase with 1p accounts. i.e. you also look more attractive to potential scammers Either way, it's a good idea to offer this if you have the correct security controls in place.
It might work, but you will get a lot of spam signups and people who you really don't want. It may work, but offering a money back service could work better, hey if someone signs up they might just use it for the month, they might not be able to afford the real price. It can work, but it might not work, you should try it.
10 is a little bit too few, don't you think? IMHO, it is not enough to generate the hype and increase the awareness of your business if not too many people know about this deal.
I think it is a great way to start. Alternatively, offering free domain names is another way of attracting new users, (you can offer it with a 3month hosting bundle, such that when they sign up you have essentially got your money back for the costs of the domain). Doing this is one way of enticing users to try out your service, but yeah, it will be more then 3 months before you start to see money coming in from your hosting services. Another option is to offer 50% discount on long plans, (such as 3 months / 6 months / 12months) Another alternative is to get some affiliate offers out there. Issue is, hosts like hostgator pay out $50 per new client(and hostgator is not the highest paying affiliate), so to get affiliates to promote your services, you need to somehow pay enough to convince them to promote you over places like hostgator, but clearly this strategy all depends on how much finances you have.
You have to vet very carefully to weed out the spammers, scammers and resource hoggers for your biz to be profitable.
In the past I used yahoo to host my sites and what I liked about them was the money back guarantee within the first 30 days. That allowed me to test a lot of sites/domain names and get my money back if I didn't like the outcome. Some may say I was using the system to my benefit, but the truth is I stuck with yahoo for years and had several domain names that I paid for for 2-3 years. At the end yahoo benefited from me way more, simply because of that little 30 day money back guarantee.