Just wondering -
How many signups do the hosts here get per month? What about the big biys like ADDR, Communitec, etc. How many do you think they get per month?

Thanks

Small resellers: 0 or 1 new sign-up per week
Medium resellers: around 3 new sign-ups per week
Big resellers: around 5 new sign-ups per week

Small real webhosts: around 9 new sign-ups per week
Medium real webhosts: around 15 new sign-ups per week
Big real webhosts: around 25 new sign-ups per week

(talking about <$20/mo packages)

Where do these figures come from?

Somebody posted those numbers (1,3,5 -- 9,15,25) on another forum, I don't remember which forum because I read lots of forums (sitepoint, webmaster-forums, freewebspace, catalog, etc)

Anyway, those numbers are not "a rule"...

[Edited by WorldOfXen on 11-15-2000 at 09:24 AM]

I think Ive heard from real time hosts that the numbers are actually much bigger than that, in fact its not unreasonable for medium sized small hosts too get as many as 20-30 signups a week, if they market right and take care of their customers.

I agree here with Charles. 20-30 per week sounds about right for medium hosts.

As far as the "Big Boys" as you put it, ADDR is not a Big Boy. They advertise quite a bit, but they do not have the reputation of being a big boy. They have the perception, but try and find people who are really happy using them.

I think the best would be to keep track of how many customer you have per month... that way you don't only coutn the new one, but also substract those who are leaving... it is surely possible to have 200 new customer in a month but also 100 that leave... this is it much less impressive ;)

I would consider the hosting side of our business to be fairly small at the moment but we are still managing around 30 (net) new customers per month.

Having said that we also run a free web space service under another brand thatgets 60-100 sign ups per day.....

Gordon

I am not a reseller, but work for a descent sized webhosting company, we do 5-10 signups a day. In addition 10-15 various other upgrades and other items we sell.

AiRoNz

Aironz,

Where does your company advertise to get these results. I am very curious because the totals are a very large spread here and im wondering what each of you, including myself, do different. I see anywhere from 5-15 per day.

Broadreach,

You can advertise just about anywhere. But, even if you run an AD in all dirs and offer 5 megs of space for $19.95, I doubt that you will get any sign ups at all.

It is different for every company, some win and some lose.
It would be hard to decide on where to advertise by asking others, just like the old thread that we had about goto.com(BTW you can search for it). Many were not satisfied but at some point, we decided to try them ourselves, and we were quite pleased with the results.

'It never hurts to try.'

I am hosted with one of the larger webhosting companies
and its my understanding they do 1500 to 2000 new accounts per month. I have no way of verifying this but for their size it doesnt seem unreasonable.

TWA

May I ask what company that is? :)

*****

Originally posted by mkaufman
May I ask what company that is? :)



http://atrium.com/*****sucks.html

I currently host with OLM.net

TWA

Yeah, they are one of the biggies... wouldn't surprise me.

Originally posted by cbaker17
I think Ive heard from real time hosts that the numbers are actually much bigger than that, in fact its not unreasonable for medium sized small hosts too get as many as 20-30 signups a week, if they market right and take care of their customers.

We often receive as many as a dozen requests for hosting referrals in a week.

Wanna guess which hosts we send them to?

it woldnt be http://www.oar.net would it?

OAR is a regional network provider, who, to the best of my knowledge, do not provide hosting.

Okay, so what host is it??? :)

CodeBrain proper, and many of our other sites, are hosted on http://www.ClearLight.com -- a firm about which we have nothing but a very long list of good things to say.

Based on our experience with them, we also heartily recommend http://www.HostMatters.com as very well run, with excellent support.

The point being, we recommend on the basis of solid performance and support.

Hmmm, Only wishin' I could get 5 signups a week.

In the last month and a half, we have had one signup that came through goto.com and as it turned out, it was credit card fraud, and not a good situation.

We've paid the fees to list in Yahoo, and Looksmart but see very little traffic from them.

I'd love to hear where people are advertising, what they are paying for the advertising and what kind of signups they are getting from the advertising.

Hits leave me less than impressed, I have a popular gaming site that has no advertising, no listings in search engines, and is visited by over 1500 people per day based purely on the domain name being the same as the game.

What suprised the heck out of me is that the programmers of the game as well as the developer have both now come on board to help out in the support forums, and neither of them are asking for the domain name, and by posting to our support forums are thereby legitimizing our fan site.

Anyway, that was off topic but shows how a proper domain name is the best form of advertising, I imagine a name like hosting.com would be a big boy if they offered quality pricing and service.

So, where are you all advertising to get these 5 to 1,000+ signups every month, week, day etc.

Thanks,
Bbox

We sign about 5+/- customers a month right now. That's because we're new and I'm sure if we uphold our promises, that will change. As for advertising, we haven't done much, it's all been word of mouth so far. I am researching methods right now for magazines (I'd LOVE to get into WIRED), trade shows, search engines (I can't seem to justify those for some reason), etc.

I envy those who sign up 100 plus and aspire to be just like them. :)

Jenn.

I've seen a posting recently that talked about conversion rates ranging from 1 in 2 visitors to 1 in 80 visitors. Sign up rates are bound to depend on the number of quality referals your site recieves.

Depends on the company and on the ad budjet - you can't get everything from word of mouth....

you need to do some promotions as well....

Companies with a budjet such as hostPro, Verio, webhosting.com and others, get lots of customers becauser their ad appears everywhere!!

Originally posted by logus

Companies with a budjet such as hostPro, Verio, webhosting.com and others, get lots of customers becauser their ad appears everywhere!![/B]

HostPro, Verio and webhosting.com don't get customers because their ad appears everywhere. First of all HostPro and webhosting.com have been around a pretty long time if I recall. But it's the support that matters. If you provided toll-free 24 hour tech support with every plan, then your sales would almost CERTAINLY increase. But, All three of the mentioned companies prices' reflect their support. I've been told this a MILLION times. Advertising does not bring in customers, it brings in clicks, it's all up to your sales and support teams after that.

Also the form of payments you accept can help to, once my company goes online (at this point) we are only going to accept Visa/Mastercard and Online checks. Some people only use Discover and American Express, or refuse to pay online at all and want to send paper checks.

There are WAY to many factors in this business to figure out "how" to get 3000 customers a month... that's why their aren't any hosts that are the "Microsoft" of the industry. HostPro and webhosting.com are close, but have a while to go.

Just my 2 cents...

comphosting,

I just read your sig for the first time. I'd always assumed it was an error, so always skipped over it. Very funny :)


Signups are a funny thing. We're about on target with what we expected coming in, though more would be nicer. We're averaging about 150-200 hits a day, though a fair share are coming from here. Our sale closure from enquiries (ie people interested enough to send us mail), is around 90% or so, so that seems good to us. I feel there are things still needed to be done on the site - some navigation changes, some backend stuff, to drive traffic better. Currently they appear to move in one direction through and out the other side without really hitting the 'meat' of the site. I've been looking at sites like Verio etc lately and have noticed they have a significant difference in layout and structure to most other sites. I can only presume it's due to spending a lot more than the rest of us on research into traffic migration. Why not pick up some pointers I say *lol*

So at least from a personal point of view, I'm looking at better site navigation and signposting once they get into the site, though looking at other avenues for advertsing as well. Window shoppers are fine, but you really need to get them interested enough to reach into their pants (or skirts for that matter), and pull out the plastic.

Greg Moore

I'm glad someone finally got it.

Originally posted by Félix C.Courtemanche
I think the best would be to keep track of how many customer you have per month... that way you don't only coutn the new one, but also substract those who are leaving... it is surely possible to have 200 new customer in a month but also 100 that leave... this is it much less impressive ;)

The old 9NetAve had about 100 new customers a day and 10 customers left each day. How true this is I don't know -- but it came from a old system administrator there.

Interesting comment above about signposting.

Yes, I have noticed that the movement of visitors through my web site does not match the buying patterns.

For example, very few people visit the special offer page but a large proportion of them sign up.
If I can make the special offer more prominent it should increase the sign up rate.

Thats the theory anyway.

Gordon

Gordon,

Funny you should mention that actually. We were running specials a while back. Links to that page were both on the index and the actual sign up page. A lot of people took a look at them, but those that signed up just used the regular form even though they were told it wasn't going to reflect the special offer on that plan. No complaints afterwards about missing out on it... Very odd. Maybe people feel a special offer won't get the same attention in support matters or something... Couldn't really say but it seems an odd quirk of the buying public...

Greg Moore