Hello,
I wonder how much do you spend on advertising for your hosting company?
How much you spend every month & every year?

Thanks!

I think this thread is more appropriate in "running a hosting business" forum, isn't it?

Anyways, about $ 50 to $ 100, planning an increase of budget though.

Zero dollars.

I think this thread is more appropriate in "running a hosting business" forum, isn't it?I agree. Thread moved!

I wonder how much do you spend on advertising for your hosting company?There are hosts (like David above) who spend next to nothing on advertising (monetarily that is), and there are hosts spending hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly. It all depends on the host's business plan and financial might of course. :)

Many hosts (especially out of those present here on WHT) rely a lot on word of mouth.

I've seen some of the 'hundreds of thousands of dollars' a month advertising in effect at other companies and I'd have to say it's one of the least plausible methods of growth (although definitely the fastest).

You don't seem to get the same types of clients you would via word of mouth: They're a whole different breed.

The tortoise beat the hare though -- whether or not it applies realistically.

It depends who you're target market is. It's as simple as that.

Zero dollars here too.. for over a year now :)
Our growth has been purely customer referrals and SEO-based work

well, many do not disclose that sort of information, including me. but for example a company like hostgator spends thousands of dollars on advertising each month. let me just put it this way, sucessful hosting companies will spend more on advertising than others. it is up to the hosting company anyway

thats nice, zero dollars, hmm

I profess a similar philosophy to that of David above. There are some very good ways of using word of mouth and then just being noisy within your target market (content is still king).

Depends on what kind of company the hosting company is though, how fast they are interested in growing, and many other factors. What works for one company, may not work for another.

We spend 0 dollars because we have 0 dollars to spend on advertising. However we keep the content on our site relative to the services we offer, which is also relative to the meta keywords we use on our site. This means that for most of the keywords searches used to find the types of services we offer, in most of the top search engines we reach the first page without spending a dime.

Word of mouth is the hardest yet, the best form of advertising. Granted thats if the word of mouth is positive

this means that you have a good optimization, this is a work for a few mounths...any way i like the thing with your advertisment...

Very little maybe 20 dollars a month. We spend most of our time, working with our existing cusomters making them happy. Word of mouth goes a long way and best part is it's free.

Well you can actually spend $0, but you can ask people to advertise for you can give them webhosting.

Zero dollars.


Same here. Free advertising (forums, including this one:lovewht: )

95%+ new business is through word of mouth, which can be VERY powerful when used and converted correctly.

As of this month, we have invested almost $1,000 into banners and such. It has been worth it so far, we have made almost $5,000 off of it so far, most of it being in yearly plans, but money is money. We are currently looking into expanding into Plesk hosting as well as cPanel. We have 4 server from The Planet that our the cPanel server. We plan to invest into Plesk servers that run windows.

There are some programs out there like Google Ads, but not as expensive and as known. They are allot cheaper to advertise on, it is also good to invest in local advertising.

Advertising is key, and if you have money to invest into it, do it. We have only been around for almost half a year.

I've seen some of the 'hundreds of thousands of dollars' a month advertising in effect at other companies and I'd have to say it's one of the least plausible methods of growth (although definitely the fastest).

You don't seem to get the same types of clients you would via word of mouth: They're a whole different breed.

The tortoise beat the hare though -- whether or not it applies realistically.
I think a combination of WOM and paid advertising is a powerful combination. The new clients you obtain through your paid advertising, become WOM advertising, and that builds on the existing WOM advertising. So WOM by itself is good, but it gets more powerful when you combine that with paid advertising.

(WOM = Word of Mouth)

For one of our other businesses we spend about 50-100 dollars every day on advertising, but the returns are good enough that we can continue to do this, and increase it every month. :)

I'm spendig 100$ per month, but i am at the beginning and i'm not in condition to calculate my ROI yet. I think that if you want to build a successful business, you need to spend a lot in advertising. Of course SEO and WOM are very important but you need time in order to obtain good results.

How do you calculate your ROI? with google system and not getting any good results,

And for the topic, I'm with 150€/month budget now.

Zero Dollars!

I think a combination of WOM and paid advertising is a powerful combination. The new clients you obtain through your paid advertising, become WOM advertising, and that builds on the existing WOM advertising. So WOM by itself is good, but it gets more powerful when you combine that with paid advertising.

(WOM = Word of Mouth)

I completely agree with this.

As a business, you should never stop to advertise. It has been proven through research that even in recessions, companies that continue to advertise their regular amounts will do much better than the companies who cut their budget because the industry isn't doing so good. I remember seeing a presentation from the CEO of Motorolla or something a couple years ago in a marketing class.

Constant advertising gives you new customers to get more WOM each month, potentially giving you "almost" exponential growth.

I was shocked to hear the numbers in here. I would have expected at least $3000/month. Guess not though.

Here's a side question: when you all were first starting out, how were your increase in sales per month? Did it start off slow, and for how long, and then when did things (in terms of amount of clients) really start picking up? Like, you noticed that after about 100 clients you were getting more WOM and referrals. Thanks!

a bajillion dollars and three cents.

Word of mouth is king, but we do have advertisments on a number of small/medium sized sites; mostly forums or web content related. I've never really put any serious money into cpc campaigns or anything through major companies - the clicks are usually so low quality.