It seems to be a no brainer that value added services are pratically a must these days to help growth.
What do you offer your clients?
Who have you partnered with and what seems to be making a big difference?

Thanks for your input.

Personally I see value added services as more of a "going with times" things rather than a competitive edge....

Come to think of it I have never utilized th "value added services" from my ISP rewards card, Credit Card or any other membership cards that were given to me, save getting a discount on petrol or car maintainence :P

Most value added services I see for the webhosting industry are the hosting services itself having the ability to support more extensions or programs that the user may barely even touch...
Its the "I have it" feeling that draws them and not the "I can use that" idea anymore.....

I think "web hosting" is going to BECOME a "value added" service over time. Vendio.com is a prime example.

I think that value added service has the time dimension and it is rapidly taking its prime position in the service industries especially, including web hosting.

Now when it is very difficult to identify the business opportunities due to the different requirement of different customers as:

different cost and price structure.
different patterns of usage/design
different marketing needs & opportunities.
different technical requirements

Service providers fail to identify special service needs at an early stage.

Hence I observe that value added service is must for the growth and it can make a big difference.

So, back to the original question:
What do you offer your clients?
Who have you partnered with and what seems to be making a big difference?

we offer our client quality in the shape of sincere efforts, high intentions, intelligent directions and skillful excution.

To earn the distinction of quality that is the perfection we render to our client which make a big difference.

One should agree that all the above inputs have their hidden costs or direct costs, that make the end product or service apparently expensive.

Unfortunately, a lot of people have the attitude " I want the quality, but I don't want to pay the price for it"

But One can't have both the ways.

Originally posted by etechsupport2
we offer our client quality in the shape of sincere efforts, high intentions, intelligent directions and skillful excution.

To earn the distinction of quality that is the perfection we render to our client which make a big difference.

One should agree that all the above inputs have their hidden costs or direct costs, that make the end product or service apparently expensive.

Unfortunately, a lot of people have the attitude " I want the quality, but I don't want to pay the price for it"

But One can't have both the ways.

Now wouldn't our lives be much easier if every customer understands that there is a price to pay for quality and also a price to pay for not having quality :)

That is the reason we gathered here for discussion and sharing ideas.
Today we are standing on a very competitive edge, we are not identifying and targeting those Quality conscious customers, This is the time to change the taste of the customers and bring them back from the price war.

Hence we today realized about the importance of value added service to this industries.

we have to educate and aware the customers that there is no both way so that they must understand that there is a price to pay for quality and also a price to pay for not having quality.

Basically, we do turnkey solutions which includes designing, developing and hosting websites for our clients.

We find that there is a huge pool of customers out there who wants to be on the web but do not know how to design or where to begin. This especially is so for small businesses out there.

Is it related with the subject of this forum? if yes please add your insight and experience pertaining to the subject.

Ah yes, it definitely is related. We are talking about Value Added Service here for web host.

What I am saying is that instead of just offering plan web hosting services, we go a little further by offering a full service which involved designing and developing the web sites for our clients and hosting them.

There are already countless numbers of web hosts arounds and you can see that with the lack of barriers of entry to the business, you get probably hundreds if not thousands new web hosts trying to fight for the same piece of the pie. What we see now is just pure web hosting and probably domain name registration as part of the current value added service. It does seems that everyone is offering that.

You will need some differentiation in order to stand out of the crowd and to do so you need to provide what your target customers needs.

If you mingle around the web savvy crowd, chances are they probably know how to design web sites and thus going for the pure web hosts probably would be apt for them. However, although there is still a huge internet community out there, most are still made up of non-tech savvy people. One example would be the established small and medium size businesses. Go to your neighborhood and see how many of them exists and how many actually have web sites ? They can be a potential market.

I am sure that most would heard about the internet and may be users but they probably do not know how and what is involved in setting up websites and designing them. You get posting in this forum where people do not know what FTP is or how to register domain names or the likes. These people have the desire to be on the web but do not have the knowledge to do so.

The tech savvy customers may already have their own websites up and running already and the reason why they are looking for new ones could be because they are dissatisfied with the old one, outgrown it or something to that nature.


The value added service that I am proposing is not something new. You can compete so much by setting different prices and packages but how far prices can fall and how much more email accounts or disk space can you provide ?

Going about a full turnkey solution would mean going for one untapped market and in that market, you don't need to go about competiting at prices but you bring about that additional value added, your design and business skills.

It probably involved more legwork by targetting your local community first by approaching them, talking to them about the benefits of having a web presence, showing them what their competitors are doing and then working with them to determine the best way to present their business and set up their web store. Work with them through every step of the way. It would be that additional personalized services which would give you additional potential customers.

This is what you are talking about when a customer has need of the full service like designing and developing the web sites for your clients and hosting them which you call a turnkey solutions.

But the question is how to identify? the business opportunities in a complete different situation due to the different requirement of different customers as:

different cost and price structure.
different patterns of usage/design
different marketing needs & opportunities.
different technical requirements

As a Service providers there is the chance that a person may fail to identify those special service needs at an early stage during the search of customers.

I have observed that a specified customer require a specefic amount of attention and treatment as per the merit of his requirement and situation.

The turnkey solutions and leg work may work when all customers are alike and their requirement is also same and focused on a very limited area but the situation is different when you work globaly from sitting in one corner of the world.

The turnkey solution is when requirements are different because you work individually with each customer and treat them different from the other. Of course if you try to do it globally then it would be difficult no matter how you offer.

Treating individual each customer with different requirements and from different angle needs total individual attention with solution to different individual customers requirement individually that time you are reaching to their satisfaction level that is perfection, on this stage the customers expectation is very high and ultimately you shall find that the customer will not leave you.

That is the reason we are talking about the need of value added service to this industries as well as others.

Eventually I must add that people can be your biggest asset or your biggest liability.

While all your comments are on target and appreciated, I think the biggest VAS I see from them, in addition to customer service and satisfaction (which has been our goal already and seems to be working great) is giving the end user the ability to build their site if they are not advanced.
So, an easy to use sitebuilder seems to be a huge VAS then?

I appreciate your suggestion to provide the end user the ability to build their site.

we should add free templates, free softwares like billing, FTP, Mailing, Domain management and selling interface for the resellers and overall 24x7 support.

Here's a question... should one charge for sitebuilder with say.. a $4.95/month plan?

No,One should not charge a site builders with say any price....

It is the time to educate the customer that Quality is not free--- it is defect free, as quality has always carried a hefty price tag.