Hi, I have had my hosting company open for nearly 2 years now, as most of you will probably know the first month goes very slow. I need some advise on where to advertise my hosting company on the internet. This forum is a good starters but since im in England, I think that puts more people off, as most people here are from USA.

So..

Are there any sites that have free advertising for webhosts in the UK as well as USA

What is the best way to get more clients?

Looking foward to your responce.:lovewht:

First, you'll probably want to "fix-up" your website. It doesn't look too professional, and I'm not a big fan of iframes.

Next, hosting package starting at £1 aren't necessarily going to bring you more clients. Even if you do begin to receive sales, you're not going to make any money.

From my experience, companies offering all services (web, reseller, gameservers, vps, dedicated, shoutcast), aren't too professional, and most of the time they don't have anything organized. They are usually kids on Summer vacation trying to make a quick $50! I'd advise you to start small, offering only shared and reseller services to start. Hopefully you're not putting shoutcast and gameservers on the same boxes as your web and reseller clients.

The best way to "get more clients" is simply offering a quality service and having your clients tell their friends, etc. Since you're "new," I'd definitely consider re-designing your whole website to try and provide a more professional image. The website doesn't have nearly enough information on it to convince a 'smart hosting shopper' to purchase from you.

Basically, I feel that everything revolves around your website at the moment. You definitely need a new one if you're expecting any type of serious sales.

Hope that helps,
Steve

I think it will be costly to do that .. Customers, prospects loyalty and some other CRM programes will be effective more than traditional ways .
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You could resolve that UK problem by leasing out some USA based servers instead. For advertising, Google AdWords is always a good route to take.

I would suggest building upon your current services and website. Improve these, and let you customers know about changes you're making. If they are for the better, your customers will do the marketing for you. Maybe reward them for that, with an Affilate program?

In any sense, if you want fast growth, the best way is by aquiring other companies. It's a little more costly upfront, but in the long run you'll see more return. (If you can keep your cusotmers happy.)

Just my two cents :peace:

First, you'll probably want to "fix-up" your website. It doesn't look too professional, and I'm not a big fan of iframes.

Next, hosting package starting at £1 aren't necessarily going to bring you more clients. Even if you do begin to receive sales, you're not going to make any money.

From my experience, companies offering all services (web, reseller, gameservers, vps, dedicated, shoutcast), aren't too professional, and most of the time they don't have anything organized. They are usually kids on Summer vacation trying to make a quick $50! I'd advise you to start small, offering only shared and reseller services to start. Hopefully you're not putting shoutcast and gameservers on the same boxes as your web and reseller clients.

The best way to "get more clients" is simply offering a quality service and having your clients tell their friends, etc. Since you're "new," I'd definitely consider re-designing your whole website to try and provide a more professional image. The website doesn't have nearly enough information on it to convince a 'smart hosting shopper' to purchase from you.

Basically, I feel that everything revolves around your website at the moment. You definitely need a new one if you're expecting any type of serious sales.

Hope that helps,
Steve

The above only works tho if you have a userbase right, how can offering a quality service to 0 clients or just a few clients get you more customers :)

I have noticed myself it can be very diffilcult to get clients without spending money on either advertising or buying other companies.

The above only works tho if you have a userbase right, how can offering a quality service to 0 clients or just a few clients get you more customers :)If the OP develops a more professional website, potential clients will notice that his business is more serious. A host's website can make it or break it when it comes down to the consumer purchasing a package.

I have noticed myself it can be very diffilcult to get clients without spending money on either advertising or buying other companies.As stated, he's advertising on public forums. Believe it or not, you can receive many clients from free forum advertisements. 5 to 10 clients can turn into 50 in a few months.

Yeah, start small and work your way up...being everything to everyone when you're first starting can kill your business. Stay focused, offer quality shared hosting accounts (at a rate that is fair and takes into account your costs to offer the support, etc.) and grow from there.

First, you'll probably want to "fix-up" your website. It doesn't look too professional, and I'm not a big fan of iframes

That is my biggest problem, I currently have got that template from template monster, now I am not the best at attually designing websites and I don't really want to spend loads of money on someone making one for me, any ideas?

From my experience, companies offering all services (web, reseller, gameservers, vps, dedicated, shoutcast), aren't too professional, and most of the time they don't have anything organized.

I have just recently started selling gameservers, vps and dedicated, I can not really see how this not professional, I would have thought it would bring in more customers otherwise just starting off with shared hosting would make people think you are using a reseller from another company. The other thing is I can't really stop selling these when I have customers that have bought them.

The best way to "get more clients" is simply offering a quality service and having your clients tell their friends, etc

That is basicly the only way Im getting clients at the moment, I had a few from wht but its all mainly word of mouth, the service we offer is brillant, we have had so much comments on the support, people basicly say we would never leave you, and some of these people have no idea how to make a website, but we told them everything you needed to know from software to how to upload.

The website doesn't have nearly enough information on it to convince a 'smart hosting shopper' to purchase from you.

Could you tell me what else to include on the site?.

The above only works tho if you have a userbase right, how can offering a quality service to 0 clients or just a few clients get you more customers

Well we have a fairly large userbase after all we have be open for nearly 2 years now.

That is my biggest problem, I currently have got that template from template monster, now I am not the best at attually designing websites and I don't really want to spend loads of money on someone making one for me, any ideas?The best option by far would be to get the site redesigned from scratch by a professional, however that could easily cost you a few thousand pounds (I should know, that's what I do).

What you really need to do with your site is start with sematically-meaningful and well structured HTML documents and then add a bit of style on top. Although this, however, will take you a couple of years to fully master.

As a few quick pointers:

1) Kill the animated Flash logo and banner.

The animated logo is annoyingly distracting and the banner doesn't at all need what I can only describe as a snowfall/bubble effect.

Replacing these with static images will prevent them from taking the user's attention from your content and make your site open to more visitors - why force visitors to have the Flash plugin for content that does not necessitate Flash?

2) Kill the iframes (please!)

Seriously, get rid of the iframes as quickly as you can. This will have a least two benefits.

Firstly, it will be more likely that users will actually see your content. With content in an iFrame, the user will have to not only scroll the main document (something most if not all users are quite familiar with these days) but they will also have to scroll the iframe content (if they notice the iframe scollbars at all) and scrolling the iframe only reveals content that is of no benefit at all to the user - just a handful of images about which the user doesn't care.

Why risk users missing your content by hiding it in iframes and why force the user to scroll to see content that is of no use?

Secondly, iframes, and frames in general, are apalling in terms of accessibility. When you look at a framed/iframed site, you can see all the frames and, based on their content and position (i.e. seeing them in context), you can determine how one frame relates to another and what the purpose of the frames are.

A screenreader, or any other program that interprets the site content and relays it to the user in any means other than visually, will not be able to deal with frames. It's just simply too tricky for a program to think and determine how one frame relates to another and what the purpose of the frames are. Framed content will be supplied to the user, via a screenreader, as, at best, a set of unrelated HTML documents.

Furthermore, it's next to impossible to navigate smoothly between frames with a non-visual browser.

If you really really really like the idea of a having a scrolling box in the middle of your site, then please use a fixed-size div with overflow:auto so that it produces the same visual effect yet will contain all content within the same HTML document. However, if you personally really really really like the idea of having a scolling box in the middle of your site, you're approaching the design of your site from the completely wrong direction.

To quickly summarise what would take a few hefty books to suitably portray, let me say one last thing: your site is there for the users, not you. Think what you, as a user, would like to see (content-wise, not style-wise). Think of how you can get as much content to the user in as few clicks as possible.

Ok Thanks so much for everyones help, basicly I need to get a new website layout, would anyone able to point me to a good place, or maybe donate one :pray:.

Any more advice is welcome

Once again thats for your help.

A correctly-designed website will reflect your business needs, requirements and your brand. A stock template will never be able to do this.

Being an online service, your website is your most important asset and you shouldn't look at the cost of having it developed as merely an outlay but as an investment.

Rather than just trying to get something/anything for free or for as little as possible, the best option would be to get the right website made just once. This will mean having to invest some serious looking money in your website, but being an investment it will pay off if you can get visitors to your website through a well-structured marketing plan.

If you can't afford a suitable website right now, then sit back and wait until you can. This is much better than adopting a new template now, and then another and then another. Get it done once and get it done correctly.

I'd recommend saving up until you have about £2000 to invest in your site and then do just that.

You could resolve that UK problem by leasing out some USA based servers instead. For advertising, Google AdWords is always a good route to take.

I would second Google Adwords. Any form of CPC advertising is going to be the best/most cost effective marketing that you could do. Remember, marketing is about impressions and impressions cost money. The more impressions the more sales. The more sales the more profit/revenue.

Experiment and see what works for you. Learn about your consumer.

£2,000 for a site? Not at all necessary! Places like templatemonster.com can provide professional looking designs for very low cost. If you managed to make the site you have now, you certainly have the skills to adapt a good looking template to meet your needs.

I would not want to pay £2000 for a template, not really even £100. If anyone is interested in making me a custom template/website I could put a link on the site and recommend customers that need a website designed to you, in return of your help.

Please keep your suggestions coming in.

Not sure if it's my connection now, but the website takes an age to load?

EDIT, No it was me!

Can I add by recommending you signup to www.forum2.co.uk where lots of UK hosts propogate, UK hosting being your market at the moment. :)

What is the best way to get more clients?


Pray?

Well, seriously.. don't rely on this forum, for starters. Try knocking on doors in your local area.

Well, seriously.. don't rely on this forum, for starters. Try knocking on doors in your local area.
Targetting the local market (IE local SMBs [ small to medium size business ]) can be made even easier if you can have a full package. That is, web design, hosting, as well as the management of every aspect of the site (installing of applications and such). This is very good if your potential client is just getting online (doesn't have a current site).

I am wondering the same thing about our domain name and hosting reseller site. Currently we have customers that we have personal contact with in our computer service business but I would like to see us expand our customer base on our site. I have been trying various things to get visitors but I have yet to get anyone to convert over to a customer. I don't have enough posts to provide links to our site at this time but hopefully soon you can take a look and give me some pointers.