Would offering a "try before you buy" period to customers be a good idea? I don't see a lot of hosts offering this.

I think that some customers would like this: they don't have to pay if they're not satisfied, and it would cost nothing to me as I'm not planning on overselling.

So basically, if there's a one month trial period, the following could happen:

September 20th: Client signs up for hosting package, it is manually activated to prevent abuse of the system, their info is sent to them. Their credit card information is not collected.

October 10th: I get back to the client asking how the would rate the service and give them a (2CO?) link where they can enter their CC info and start getting billed for the service.

October 17th: if the client hasn't taken any action, send them an e-mail saying that they have 72 hours to submit the billing form.

October 20th: If there's still no response, terminate their account.

If you're wondering, I don't have a hosting company but I'm curious if this is a good idea.

to many people would try to abuse it. Meaning they would use the mb of disk space and mb of bandwith you give them. You could lose money on doing that.

I use 30 day money back guarantee, works for me :)

Originally posted by Jon FB
to many people would try to abuse it. Meaning they would use the mb of disk space and mb of bandwith you give them. You could lose money on doing that.

How would I lose money though?

If the dedicated server has remaining bandwidth and storage and there is no overselling involved it seems fairly safe to offer this. Of course it could also be limited to people with valid domains to add some more peace of mind.

Originally posted by whoppe
I use 30 day money back guarantee, works for me :)
So many hosts offer the 30 day guarantee that now it's a standard feature and no longer a major selling point (IMHO). Also, the fly-by-night hosts are known not to honour this guarantee, which gives a bad image to all new webhosts. It seems that letting the customer test out the reliability, speed and support of a webhost without paying anything would be appreciated by a customer looking for a good host.

well if you where to do this they would have to "qualify" for it so you acually know they are acually testing instead of having free hosting.

I own a pretty small company that offers a free week trial of a trimmed down package.

So far, it has only been used once but they signed up for 6 months because of it :)

Giving them a free period trial may lead to them abusing the system. Not all will do it but you might get a few which would. They could do a spam all they can campaign and run, place warez for downloads or the likes.. Since there is no obligation on their part, in the end, you are the one which needs to clean up the mess.

Don't give them email access. We used to do it and trimed it down. Just give them what they need to test out the service.

We don't offer it and don't plan to. If someone will talk with us, we might give them a small quick demo for maybe an hour (without email capabilities) but as far as any extended period of time...no. Too many simply abuse it.

well mabey have a test account out only for the people that ask that are interested in your business? You would of corse have to trim it down alot, but mabey it could work but I am still skeptical about it though. If you do it good luck :)

The trial periods are just an invitation for spamming and nothing more. With all the people that try to create fraudulent accounts already I could just imagine the amount of scammers you would attract.

It's a good idea to disable e-mail options on trial accounts, think i might think about offering a 7 day trail, might attracked new customers.

When you say disable a few options, what things do you have in mind? i know e-mail should be, for one thing, anything else?

Of course you turn these options on when they pay for a plan ;)

Think that idea is just asking for people to abuse your system :rolleyes: Think a 30 day money back guarentee is safer.