Lately new signups have come to a halt.
I have tried alsorts, advertising, encouraging clients to tell friends, but everything has slowed down.

I know my payment method is only paypal, but I am limited to what services I can use being located in the UK and not having a major credit card to use internationally.

Can anyone point out to where I going wrong or give some suggestions? site link is in my sig.

Thanks :)

Just checked out your website. Looks nice. Don't really see any problem there. Your prices are very reasonable.

Are you going out into the community to try to gather new customers or is most your traffic from online sources? Also, might want to increase prices a little bit, so you could afford to offer existing customers referral bonuses, give them a little incentive to refer friends, family, or other businesses.

I am sure others here can throw in their 2 cents, and hopefully we can get to the bottom of this so you can make more money.

Good luck

Well in all honestly, if you dont got major credit cards, or other payment methods, that means you have a strict budget. So if you cant pay for advertisments, bills, or setup your own foundation without relying on your customers and employees, i think this is the wrong field for you at this time. Alot of people say its easy, but you have evaulate it, so it seems your not happy with your results, maybe you should look into a new venture, that will better fit your budget.

Well Good Luck Sir, hope you figure somthing out

If you are in the UK can i just ask why you are charging in $? Where are you advertising? if you advertise in the UK market then the $ prices may put people off. Do you accept cheques? you should make sure they clear before you set up the account but many UK customers like to pay that way.

If you are advertising and charging in the US then you may want to look at someone like 2checkout they arent that expensive and then you can accept the two major worldwide credit cards, Visa and Mastercard.

Are you advertising on all the free hosting directories? You may want to look for some link exchanges etc in the offers forum or other places like that?

Maybe also offer some kind of reward for customers who refer a friend?

Otherwise your site looks nice so i dont think its anything on that front.

Although there are many posts here worthy of the "Not ready for web hosting business", I don't think IdleServ falls into that category. He did mention he was advertising and he use to have signups but lately they have come to a halt. This, to me, indicates he does have some capital to invest, and is willing to do so.

tazd9t9 offers some good advice.

Your website looks very good and polished and yours is the first site I have come across that lists the sites that you host. I like that though, lets people see just how fast your servers are.

The only question I have is what would you do if someone actually used up the 10Gb of bandwidth you're offering on a $3 account? I know some reseller accounts allow you to oversell, but you still have to be realistic, you may as well say that terrible U word.

Thanks for your replies...

The reason the prices are in $ is because my servers are in the US...

Im not "not ready for web hosting business", I have over 90 clients since october 2003 :)
Dont know if that seems too little compared to others, but I wouldnt know.

Just looking for any advertising tips, etc :)

Thanks again.

acec, I have had one or two customers reach their bandwidth limit on the $3 plan, they just upgraded.

I am not a reseller, I rent my own dedicated servers (2) :)

My servers are also in the US even though i run a UK company, but i charge in £ i use worldpay so they can pay in $ or Euros if they want but i find they like it to pay in their own currency. It does depend of course on what country most of your customers are in. Maybe even just list the equivalent £ price.... just something for you to think about.

Heres a list of directories you could submit your site to:

http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Hosting/Directories/

And heres a list of UK specific ones:

http://dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/Business_and_Economy/Internet/Web_Hosting/Directories/

You may also try the press releases and interviews you can submit on sites such as www.findmyhost.com and www.findsp.com

If you want to advertise locally, advertise in the local papers or even supermarkets where they have ad boards up or anywhere that will let you put posters up.

Do you give out business cards to customers? ie if you ever post invoices to customers maybe include a couple of business cards so that if they have friends who want a host they have your card at hand.

Finally ... how are you placed on the search engines? you may want to check they keywords you want people to use on Google and maybe tweak your meta tags. Make sure you do lots of search engine submission etc and keep it up to date.


Hope this helps anyway

maybe your prices are TOO cheap???

Originally posted by LaurenStephens
maybe your prices are TOO cheap???


That is a good quote, depends again on what market you target, uk hosts do usually charge more than US so you could probably charge more, even in the US and if you advertise locally you can charge even more.... its not ripping people off but it is fitting in with the market you are in.

Some customers do think that if a price is too low then the support will be no good or there is some catch and wont sign up, especially if they have been around these forums and seen some of the horror stories with the hosts that offer everything for virtually no price.

IdleServ, i'm in the same boat as you. I've started advertising more and more, but this year has been incredibly slow for me so far. Only very little sign ups. I'm re-evaluating my approach to things and hopefully things should start looking bright.

Look at your prices. You are targeting the lower part of the market and there's lots of competition. $3 per month for 10GB? Read through this forum - you get the idea. A good, high quality service should have a fair value (even for yourself). A Big Mac meal costs more than your hosting and it only lasts for one meal.

I just want to say that yes - charging too little for a lot of service does scare some users away. I'm doing it right now actually. But I know it scares people away because I'm the same way.

*sounds silly I know* But I were asked to purchase from me based on price & plans alone - I wouldn't.

But this also lets me know that when I do raise my prices - I won't get as many of the budget buyers - but will hopefully make up for it with the people like me...cautious.

i really think its paypal.

Check your web logs of late and see if there are traffic coming in and where they coming in from. See which pages are popular and which are not. That should give you some clues.

Also in your drop menu, it list a forum but it yield a Page 404 instead.

It could be the target audience, you did mentioned you are a UK based business but targetting customers based on the US dollar. It may actually make the US audience uneasy because of the operating hours time difference and the issue about them not being able to call for support.

As as the rest said, it seems that you are targetting the lower end market and probably so because only Paypal is offered as a payment method. This market is quiet saturated.

By the way, you did mentioned that you adverised, how extensive were the advertising and what were the target audience ? Was there are inquiries that came from those ?

I avoid pay-pal when I can. I agree your prices may be too low, you site design is good, but you may try freshing it up for a new look. Also, you may try targeting a niche market, or offering unique services to set yourself apart. Maybe the place you used to have success adverstising is losing visitors, you may need to come up with a new ad strategy. Good luck.

My 3 cents (inflation)

Thank-you for the links tazd9t9.

Thanks for everyone's comments; I'm getting new ideas on what to do to improve my services :)

I’m definitely going to have to find another payment processor and probably invest more in advertising, before I went for the cheapest places - I didn't want to end up loosing more.

I’m going to reconsider my price plans and perhaps offer more plans?

I think increase your prices a bit, then spend more money on advertisements.

Btw, your customized whoiscart looks great :)

Originally posted by eddy2099

Also in your drop menu, it list a forum but it yield a Page 404 instead.


Really? What browser are you using & version? thanks.

Thanks for the comment cyberultra ;)

Many things to think about here:

1) Website is bland and doesn't stand out. You want people to bookmark your site when they are shopping around so they can come back easily.

2) Package overhaul. Prices are too cheap in my opinion. 90 clients paying $3/mo is my version of a total nightmare. Lots of support and not even enough cash to pay for the box.

3) Niche marketing. This is where the small guy can do well. Localise and globalise your website. Meaning be able to target the local community but also appeal to wider audiences. Try and offer something to the local community that no-one else does.

Originally posted by IdleServ
Really? What browser are you using & version? thanks.



I am using IE 6 and it seems to only have the drop menus from http://www.idleserv.net/order.html . The other pages does not activate the drop menus. If you point to 'Support', I see the list which includes 'forums'.

Well its been 3-4 weeks and I have completed the new site, along with adding 2checkout to my payment methods and instant account activation!

Within 2 hours of putting the new site up, I got a few orders :)


Thank-you all,
One Web Hosting Company on the way to full sucess.

what payment system did those new orders come through??

Andrew

Another thing you may want to try is have a uk flag and a us flag in the upper corner of your site (right or left - your choice). If a customer clicks one or the other all the prices they see are in their currency. This will really help IMO. When I see pounds or sterling or whatever I have no idea how much that really equals in dollars, and if they don't have an easy way for me to find out, I leave. The same would go if my national currency was not US dollars and the site I was at had prices in US dollars.

Originally posted by IdleServ
Within 2 hours of putting the new site up, I got a few orders :)

There you go. And people say the site doesn't matter - it does. :)

NetHosted, the new orders have been 2checkout :)

mj4589, I considered this I figured maybe I could get away with putting $5 on US site = £5 on UK site.
Trouble is I would like to offer UK based hosting, but there is not one decent dedicated company I have seen. Bandwidth limits are stupid, who wants 20 GB a month on a dedicated server?

I dont think this has been mentioned in any posts in this thread but there is always room for improvement in search engine optimisation. Do you have a good stats program which tracks keywords, phrases and where people are coming from? You could work and analyse these and see what can be improved.

Originally posted by stealthdevil
IdleServ, i'm in the same boat as you. I've started advertising more and more, but this year has been incredibly slow for me so far. Only very little sign ups. I'm re-evaluating my approach to things and hopefully things should start looking bright.

I've been wondering about this myself. I had a steady stream of sign-ups up until Christmas, but since the new year things have been really, really slow.

I've started advertising with Adwords, locally and have been trying to tweak my SE positions for various searches, but things are barely trickling.