Well, I've been in business about 3.5 months now. I've solely targetted newbies, people who don't know anything about web hosting. I find about 1:10 of these people get frustrated and give up and want a refund. The ones that stick it out though seem to be VERY loyal and use very little resources. They also tend to tell their friends a great deal. I'm wondering if anyone else feels this way. The strangest thing to me is, I seem to get more questions from experienced customers like "what's wrong with my PHP-Nuke?" Newbies and experienced users alike both ask "why isn't my site working?" and I answer "because you didn't put in the www directory" and stuff like that. So anyway, I'm wondering if other people feel the same way I do, or if they prefer experienced web hosters to host with them.

To summarize I like newbies better because:

1. They ask less questions.
2. They consume less resources.
3. They don't seem to mind downtime because they don't visit their own site much (not that I'll have downtime anymore, I just moved to pure Internap from a reseller account).
4. They seem to be more loyal.
5. Cpanel seems to blow them away as something that is just "amazing".

Any thoughts?

They also bitch more on minor problems and keep you in the wee hours of the day trying to make you solve a simple tech question. They fill your helpdesk with things like how do i access my mail.


I'd say if your host was stable enough and reputable, for one you woudn't have downtime, a person who is staisfied does not ask questions (assuming he knows what he's doing). I mean i woudln't want a newbie managing a Ded Server and making it go down every now and then just because they dont use alot of resources. Anyways my 2 cents.

I like the ones that are clearly very intelligent, but at the same time respect my expertise. They usually have cool web sites, ones that I'm especially proud to host.

These people still have questions of course, but they're interesting questions, rather than the typical boring "how do I upload my site?" questions.

It's these types of people that I especially want to have as clients, and that's why I've structured my business to appeal to technically-inclined customers: this is the polar opposite of targetting newbies.

Let me clear up my original post. I don't mean newbies to computers or the web. I mean newbies to web hosting. They know what Front Page is, they know how to FTP, etc. They've just never paid for hosting before (probably have it hosted free somewhere). I find my best audience to be college students or just people in their twenties.

Favorite customers : bronze/silver shared hosting
- Require very little support. Often upload a site and then leave it for years paying for hosting :)

That's exactly what I'm talking about! No databases, no perl scripts, no PHP, etc. Throw up a site and forget about it.

We're not hosting any web sites but to answer that questoin, I'd say those who are experienced in marketing and don't expect to get rich from a $100 investment, we often get those question, if I invest $30 how many clients do you guarantee in return.

So it's really the best thing to deal with clients who are more realistic and know what they are doing.

Beginners are welcome as well though :)