When I think about it, I used to have so many doubts about this area of business when I first started. I started out with almost a full month of no signups. It's hard in the beginning, but it gets so much easier. Anybody else notice, how less and less advertising is needed to gain customers, as the months pass?

To all of you that are just starting out with your web hosting, don't give up. It really does get easier the longer you stay in business. That's just my opinion of course. Maybe you have a different one?

Hello, how long until you get the first client?

Well Yes, I could agree with you, when I started I had someone help me who is banned from these forums (sorry cant mention there name :-)). It was better when I started to get help from the great people here at WHT forums. (THANKS :lovewht: :clap: )
Most of my customers are word of mouth.


All I can say is if you need help, get it here as there are heaps of excellent people here that can and are willing to help out and give you great advice, I only wish I did this when I first started..

The more customers you have, the more customers you'll get. Word of mouth kicks in.

Yeah i currently have doubts i've been running a month and a half with no signups. But i have to agree that there are plenty of fine people here on WHT who are willing to help.

As the months pass gets more easy, I don't agree with that hehe, it is as hard as it is the first day, but as time goes pass gets even harder because cliental grows and work increases. The race with the larger hosting companies stays the same.

Hello,

Yeah, But big host started small

It's a lot harder now than it used to be back in 2002 ish. It got to a point sometimes that new accounts were a burden, but not so much a burden now. :)

The more customers you have, the more customers you'll get. Word of mouth kicks in.

That basically sums it up. If you've got the drive and the financial means to keep up, it does get easier in a sense if you have a solid starting point.

It's hard in the beginning, but it gets so much easier.

To put things into perspective, when did you start out?

When I think about it, I used to have so many doubts about this area of business when I first started. I started out with almost a full month of no signups. It's hard in the beginning, but it gets so much easier. Anybody else notice, how less and less advertising is needed to gain customers, as the months pass?

To all of you that are just starting out with your web hosting, don't give up. It really does get easier the longer you stay in business. That's just my opinion of course. Maybe you have a different one?

Well to be quite honest I think it gets a lot harder as time goes by. Sure you get better at what you are doing but the market becomes more and more tough. At one time I was hosting like 4000 domains. Right now I am hosting 2000. I am getting one or two signups a day (nearly all of them are already customers, used to be customers in the past or were referred by an existing customer). Used to get 10. Note that my quality has increased a lot but I am losing anyway. That's because everybody is selling 1000 GB packages now. Something I don't really want to do at all. Not because it's bad for me but because it's bad for my customers. To be quite honest I am seriously considering to start offering these 1000 GB packages as well now. It's difficult to make someone click on your add if your ad says "10 GB" while the ad of everyone else says "1000 GB". Of course the quality I provide to my customers has resulted in word of mouth advertising but I think this is not sufficient to make it on a long term. People usually tend to be attracked by numbers and quantity. Everybody complains about the supermarkets and how they destroy small businesses but then the exact same people buy their stuff in the supermarket so you see the winning strategy.

Hello, how long until you get the first client?

It took us a little less than a month. We were just advertising on web hosting forums at the time.

The more customers you have, the more customers you'll get. Word of mouth kicks in.

Yeah, that's exactly what I discovered.

Yeah i currently have doubts i've been running a month and a half with no signups. But i have to agree that there are plenty of fine people here on WHT who are willing to help.

What I might suggest is to get rid of those forums for now(hide the link), and supply the link in your welcome emails to customers once you start getting some. People might be turned off when they click the link to your forums and see no posts. They might be thinking "huh..no posts by any members. does this company even have any members" or they very well could see the forum and look past that thinking "awesome, that's just extra support i could use if these guys take forever to answer tickets". They're just random thoughts, but I honestly didn't like to advertise when we didn't have many members. I would never lie to any questions relating to it, but I just didn't advertise it. That's your call. It's just an idea.

As the months pass gets more easy, I don't agree with that hehe, it is as hard as it is the first day, but as time goes pass gets even harder because cliental grows and work increases. The race with the larger hosting companies stays the same.

If you handle it all, yourself, then I could see the difficulty or running the business to be true, but when you earn enough money to hire staff, I find it to be much easier. Yes, the race with those larger hosting companies is still pretty difficult :P

To put things into perspective, when did you start out?

September of 2007

Well to be quite honest I think it gets a lot harder as time goes by. Sure you get better at what you are doing but the market becomes more and more tough. At one time I was hosting like 4000 domains. Right now I am hosting 2000. I am getting one or two signups a day (nearly all of them are already customers, used to be customers in the past or were referred by an existing customer). Used to get 10. Note that my quality has increased a lot but I am losing anyway. That's because everybody is selling 1000 GB packages now. Something I don't really want to do at all. Not because it's bad for me but because it's bad for my customers. To be quite honest I am seriously considering to start offering these 1000 GB packages as well now. It's difficult to make someone click on your add if your ad says "10 GB" while the ad of everyone else says "1000 GB". Of course the quality I provide to my customers has resulted in word of mouth advertising but I think this is not sufficient to make it on a long term. People usually tend to be attracked by numbers and quantity. Everybody complains about the supermarkets and how they destroy small businesses but then the exact same people buy their stuff in the supermarket so you see the winning strategy.

I'd like to say that, that's not true for me, but I'm also not hosting nearly 2000 domains..I think that stems from the audiences you seek out with advertising. Maybe aim for people that are more educated about Web Hosting?

I'd like to say that, that's not true for me, but I'm also not hosting nearly 2000 domains..I think that stems from the audiences you seek out with advertising. Maybe aim for people that are more educated about Web Hosting?

That's kind of difficult when you have like 60 letters to convince a customer (on Google Adwords). Sure I can try to gain new customers on WHT etc. but there is too much competition here too. I wouldn't get enough customers to keep my customer base large enough. Afterall this ain't no hobby for me. It's my full time job. There is no plan B. Webhosting pays my rent my food my clothes my health care. I must keep it big enough to keep me alive.

Well I mean, buy ad space on popular design sites like at Deviant Art. A lot of graphic designers do their research, before they pick their host, as a bad host with lots of cpu usage from "unlimited plans" can very well reflect badly on a site they designed and setup...so they might avoid hosts like that.

For example, I posted some banners up in several purdue computer networking classes, and got very educated customers from it. Google Adwords is horrible at targeting a certain type of customer, in my opinion.

It's challenging to run a business no matter what your size. As you grow, your problems and challenges become different.

One example: It's easy to say you'll hire someone when you get big enough. But have you gone through the process of finding, interviewing, hiring, training staff? It takes time and resources - it's not as easy as it sounds.

I believe that having a business plan is the way to go if you want to make it in this world.

From my experience I can tell you that without a niche you are depending on luck and that is not the way to go in a business.

... (nearly all of them are already customers, used to be customers in the past or were referred by an existing customer).


That is actually a good sign. It means that people who have really used your services are happy with them.


To be quite honest I am seriously considering to start offering these 1000 GB packages as well now. It's difficult to make someone click on your add if your ad says "10 GB" while the ad of everyone else says "1000 GB".


If you must, then do it under a different business name, and on different servers. You can own a steakhouse and a burger joint. They should not be related though.

Maybe you can have a landing page that says something like:

you want quality? click here
you want quantity? click here

You can even disguise them as if they were affiliate links, "sorry we don't do that exact thing here, you might try over there".

:)