Hello everyone

I am doing some research on the hosting industry and have some questions mostly directed at established and experienced web hosts. If you are kind enough to answer them or at least some, it would be much appreciated. I welcome PMs if you don't wish to display information publicly.

1. How long have you been in business?

2. When starting out, did you target a specific market? If so, what type of market (i.e. may be a certain age group, people with certain interests, maybe just your local community)? If you didn't have a market in mind, did you just put up a website and hope that customers would come? If so, did this work for you, or did you have to change your image or marketing to suit a specific market you had in mind? How has your market changed over the years if at all?

3. How long was it until you started to get a steady stream of customers? Did you aggressively market your business, or perhaps bought another and let word of mouth do the rest? Basically, how did your customers find you and how long was it until you were content with the income received given the amount of time and money you invested.

4. What do you think sets your business apart from the rest? Is it customer service, image / appeal, features, technology used, etc.

5. Have you noticed any trends in customers and hosting in general over the years? Have new customers slowed down since the dotcom era? What are your thoughts or expectations on the future of hosting, both to your business and in the industry? Will the large corps (Go Daddy for example) make it too hard to compete for smaller businesses with less resources?

6. Finally, do you have any links related to web hosting research and information that you have found useful in starting and managing your business.


Kind regards

1. This company has been in business since October. My previous company, which I left in September, was launched in August 2004.

2. The first time around, no. This time, yes - small business. At the first company, as naive as it sounds, yes we did expect to post a few general ads and have customers pouring in. I have to laugh at that now. Of course it did not work, so we had to become more focused on the local market. A few months before I sold the company, though, we actually tried to broaden our focus again, and it seemed to work Ok.

3. It takes from two to three months to get your name out there and get people curious about what you're doing. Both times now, it's definitely been aggressive marketing on our part. Believe it or not, our best methods of gaining new clients are free classified ads, Google AdWords (though we don't use that anymore), and forums. I and another member of our staff are very active on forums such as WHT, NBT, HHO, etc.

4. The fact that small business is what makes us tick.

5. Hosting has only grown faster, as an industry, since the dotcom bust. Even now, hosts still focus too much on the U.S. market. International growth, specifically in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and South America, is astounding. I think the hosting market will continue to grow at breakneck speed. In the next one to two years, we'll start seeing hosting companies with over 1million active users - right now the largest have about 400,000. No, I don't think GoDaddy, 1and1, and iPower will cause too many problems - not yet, anyhow. The market is still too saturated. So one more trend I can see would be consolidation, but only in another three or five years.

6. www.hostingtech.com www.webhosting.info www.thewhir.com www.geeksgather.com

I don't own a hosting company so I won't answer all of your questions, but I did work for a company with hundreds of thousands of shared and dedicated hosting customers so I think I can give a few tips.

- Good affiliate programs matched with a great reputation can do a lot. In the case that I saw, a great affiliate program matched with a mediocre reputation is just as good (or better). Many big hosting companies have affiliate programs that they actually lose a profit on the first year, so unless you can match that, you better make sure you're providing a really good service.

- Go the extra mile for people who will be very vocal about the service or who will have access to many other clients (web designers, developers, etc). These are the kinds of people who would really help your business out (esp in addition to your affiliate program ;-).

- Learn something. Learn a lot of things. Not only does hosting require you to be able to act quickly and support a large range of issues, but you will find you have a lot more chances to talk (about yourself/hosting) if you know a lot.

The barrier to entry for Linux is remarkably small (like using the freely available www.colinux.org or vmware player). Learn how to install and configure Apache, MySQL, etc. Take some time to learn about PHP -- at least the common error messages and how to fix them.

Knowing these tools will also give you an opportunity to provide more advanced services (upselling is good!) to your customers and means you're not so locked in to the often costly software and services of others.

What company did you work for? (If you'd rather not share, that's fine. It just sounds really interesting. :))

Sorry, I'd rather not say just to be cautious. But I will say that I was truly amazed at how unorganized it was, yet they were able to pour money in to advertising and really push the limits of the employees to keep customers.

I don't work in web hosting anymore and the company I work for is a million times better in every possible way than the previous. And yet, I still have a (somewhat masochistic?) interest in hosting.

No problem! It's funny that you seem attracted to this industry - I have noticed the same thing with myself! I sold my company (which I had been running for two years) in September, thinking I was leaving for good. Right after I sold it, I helped a couple of companies with their own plans, and then now I'm back in business already! There's just something about this industry that makes it very cool.

Hello everyone

I am doing some research on the hosting industry and have some questions mostly directed at established and experienced web hosts. If you are kind enough to answer them or at least some, it would be much appreciated. I welcome PMs if you don't wish to display information publicly.

1. How long have you been in business?

2. When starting out, did you target a specific market? If so, what type of market (i.e. may be a certain age group, people with certain interests, maybe just your local community)? If you didn't have a market in mind, did you just put up a website and hope that customers would come? If so, did this work for you, or did you have to change your image or marketing to suit a specific market you had in mind? How has your market changed over the years if at all?

3. How long was it until you started to get a steady stream of customers? Did you aggressively market your business, or perhaps bought another and let word of mouth do the rest? Basically, how did your customers find you and how long was it until you were content with the income received given the amount of time and money you invested.

4. What do you think sets your business apart from the rest? Is it customer service, image / appeal, features, technology used, etc.

5. Have you noticed any trends in customers and hosting in general over the years? Have new customers slowed down since the dotcom era? What are your thoughts or expectations on the future of hosting, both to your business and in the industry? Will the large corps (Go Daddy for example) make it too hard to compete for smaller businesses with less resources?

6. Finally, do you have any links related to web hosting research and information that you have found useful in starting and managing your business.


Kind regards

1. I'm not longer in business, our company launched December 2002 and stopped doing business around October 2004. Almost 2 years.

2. Originally I didn't really have a plan who to market to, I just had a reseller account and hosted some friends for free and they appreciated my services, they introduced me to people who wanted hosting service and were willing to pay for it. Over time they introduced their friends. It was a slow process and I didn't make a whole lot of money during that time however it was great to see new customers sign up. During the last year of our company operating, we had a pretty steady flow of gaming customers and a decent flow of colocation customers.

3. Word of mouth was great for our shared hosting, marketing shared hosting on WHT is very difficult as there are so many hosts. It helped to advertise on WHT forums whenever we were doing domain sales or colocation/gaming servers. Google Adwords helped a lot as well as we weren't too specific with our keywords. The biggest mistake is I never advertised locally, I always felt that was for the small guys.

4. Nothing really set us apart, most people viewed us as a professional company at the time and well established due to our pricing, service was pretty good for a while and I was always there to answer tech support. We took a large loss to offer cheap game servers on high quality dual xeons located on XO bandwidth out in Fremont so perhaps that helped us.

5. Not much has changed, most customers want the best bang for their buck. I highly doubt competition will hurt, it just means hosts will have to take more risks and willing to lose money to gain money. Most of the larger companys never really offer the same features as the smaller guys, because they are so well known they don't have to. It's all about the market and what the customers looking for.

6. Pingzine.com, wikipedia.com, and of course WHT.