I think creating a new hosting company has no point if you're going to differenciate in terms of price and service because there are already many good companied that offer great price and services. There's always a way to differenciate such as NearlyFreeSpeech.NET did :)

These days, difference is more in the image you give of your company.

Do you have ideas of how a new company can differenciate beside the old criteria (speed, support, uptime, space, bandwidth, free domain, etc...) ?

I've put some thought into this lately, and I think that one of the best ways for a hosting company to diffrentiate itself nowadays is by not putting the word host into its name and actually making an effort to do something other than web hosting. (i.e. by becoming less of a "hosting company" and more of an internet services provider).

I think creating a new hosting company has no point if you're going to differenciate in terms of price and service because there are already many good companied that offer great price and services. There's always a way to differenciate such as NearlyFreeSpeech.NET did :)

These days, difference is more in the image you give of your company.

Do you have ideas of how a new company can differenciate beside the old criteria (speed, support, uptime, space, bandwidth, free domain, etc...) ?

That's the core of creating a successful company, differentiating yourself from the competition and offering services that your competition does not. Everyone here is trying to figure out the same thing, so I doubt you'll get much help ;)

I don't know how many times I've stressed this but there are ways to change your image besides price and service. For one thing offer innovative technology and target developers. Even better, target your local market, get out meet people; find out who's who in your community and work a reputation there. Sales isn't just emails and live chat. Sitting in a chair all day can certainly limit your potential for success. Some of the best customers come from a simple lunch meeting or local business mixer. (quite possibly the only thing the BBB is good for)

Theme your company. We're dinosaurs :)

I think it add something unique to your image and you have promotional material ideas. For an example, see demodemo.com, I absolutely love the monkey on their web site. It make the site more friendly, add a touch of humor and humanity to it. Not to mention they got a mascot for any promotional banner/postcards/letter that they might want to send out. And it's very brandy, I know when I think of demodemo, I think of the monkey!

One thing you can do is find a local group and build hosting around it.

For example:

Your local sports teams (beer leagues) almost all of them want to have a site but all the site builders out there are not designed to be team friendly. With a little development you could build a hosting solution where you provide a team site builder. You can provide a premium service and your number of competitors are probably next to none.

I see lots of ways people can 'wrap' hosting for a niche that have not been done effectively. Image hosting was one way but if you think about the different types of businesses, groups and markets each of them are looking for an easier way to build and maintain a site.

Yes, that's right, but I expected something more like "make things more simple and minimalist like ASO or TextDrive, people like it" :)

Pixelized said it well......... we have a two man sales force that basically cold calls and works referrals, offerring all of our services ( web design, hosting, SEO, ecommerce etc) to our local metropolitan area. We close, on average, a deal every other day for web design, and 5 or 6 other service contracts a week..

Do you realize that although business owners see MANY salesmen ( or saleswomen) each week... you will probably be the first person that came in and offered them internet services face to face....to me, web design and hosting is something that is best sold in person.....and these customers stay with you.... we have been doing web design and hosting since late 1999, and still have our first customer.

We arent the lowest price by any means, in fact our hosting, at $19.95 per month for a modest acct is rather high, but no one will leave us for another company a thousand miles away that they have never dealt with face to face.

I drive down the streets in some areas, and every few blocks is one of our customers.

We dont have 900 million hosting customers like 1 and 1 does, but with nearly 1500 customers averaging $400 per year in hosting fees and additional services..... do the math.....
Start talking to local businesses, most of them need something you offer

. . . Do you have ideas of how a new company can differenciate beside the old criteria (speed, support, uptime, space, bandwidth, free domain, etc...) ?
I saw the need to differenciate, when I created HTTPme's forum platform, as the actual site. It created a bit of a buzz, and most said it wouldn't work, but they were proved soooooo wrong. Other hosts have copied that idea, and that's very flattering. It's a tough model to work, but did it did differenciate httpme from other hosts, and provide an efficient platform for communicating with potential and existing clients. :)

But as for other methods of differenciating yourself, I'm not sure there are any.

I've found that offering many different types of hosting platforms helps to differentiate our hosting company from others. Having hosting packages on control panels besides cPanel helps. Offering Windows hosting and Linux hosting is a start. But having both, with a choice of control panels and different options for each is an advantage in that, you have a better chance of having exactly what the customer is looking for.

By offering other products like Reflexion Spam Protection and VoIP services, we've got more to offer than the typical hosting company that only has cPanel, dirt cheap with lots of disk space. I can't understand companies that just offer 1 big plan and nothing else. How many people only ever eat vanilla ice cream?