I'm curious to know if the name of the company impact the decision making of choosing a web host provider.

What do you think?

[Edited by Quoc on 04-08-2001 at 10:44 PM]

If your web site address is something like webhosting.com, nthosting.com, unixhosting.com, webhost.com etc... it may attract some users with no efforts at all. But it will give you a sale no guarantee. Therefore regardless of name if your company is offerring reliable hosting service with prompt support it will become popular after sometime. Overall friendly name may give an aid.

Try marketing: wesuckathostingu.com and see how many signups you get :)

Point: yes.

Does it mean wearethebesthost.com will give lots of sign ups.

Originally posted by m6.net
Does it mean wearethebesthost.com will give lots of sign ups.
I don't think that one will, but I wouldn't mind having the domain webhosting.com. Not that I feel there's anything wrong with my company's name, but I'll bet WebHosting.com gets a ton of traffic just because of people typing webhosting.com into their browser's address bar when looking for a Web host (I know I did that several years ago).

thanks for the reply.

How about another level of this question,

does it matter if the company name is some ambiguous name like verio that doesn't suggest it's about web hosting vs something-host.com ?

Originally posted by Quoc
does it matter if the company name is some ambiguous name like verio that doesn't suggest it's about web hosting vs something-host.com ?

Yes. A name which has no inherant meaning costs more to build up brand recognition for, since people don't immediately associate it with your product. However, once you have established your "brand name" having a "meaningless" name helps, as it avoids confusion: Everybody knows that "amazon.com" is a place where you can buy books now, whereas if they have been named "books.com" there would be people who tried "book.com" instead. "webhosting.com" is a nice generic domain name, but it is pretty unmemorable -- people who see advertising and try to enter the site later are likely to end up at hosting.com, web-hosting.com, or one of many other similar generic domains.

Basically, "verio.com" is an expensive brand name to build up in the first place, but in the end it will probably do better than "webhosting.com".

Exactly true. Only the self-proclamed domain druids don't understand this. They still register even 3 word composites.

Want a nice demonstration?

Go to whois.net and type e.g. "broker" in the upper search field. You get a list of all (well, almost all) registerd domains with the word "broker" in.

Then go try to find only one of them with a developed website, you'll have a hard time :) They're all owned by domaindruids and ebizdwarfs

-and my example was a bit extreme, but companies test market names for a reason. People will buy Pepsi's new cola no matter what, but they do spend some time seeing which name people like better.

I know I've personally bought jerky with names like, "Buffalo Bob's Hickery Smoked Pepper Beef Chew" over "Tom's jerky" and hot sauce with names that sounded cool. In fact, I have two bottles of "Ass in the Tub - Hot Sauce" :)

Again, extreme examples, but...

think about it... how likely are you to buy a server from our WHT member called "loserservers"? =D

I guess that's why NoHosting.com isn't taken yet

Hmmmm....how many other products have names that include a generic identifier? Chrysler, Nike, Timex, Kodak, Green Giant - seems to me that this is a phenomenon exclusive to web hosting. Might be some good reasons for it, but offhand, I suspect it's a phase the web has grown out of.

I never knew a name is so important. I've been reading like dozen of pages everywhere in search for my question.

Lexicon is a famous company who is responsible for coming with stuff like dasani , zima, behond.com ,onstar, pentium, indesign, powerbook.....They thought up like 1000 names for the past few years. These guys are amazing. I wish they can think for me of a name but they charge $35,000 and up.

They have pretty cool analysis for free though.
Like say which car sounds faster , Taza , or Paza . Taza. Which car sounds more dependable, Bazia, or Vazia . Bazia.

Unlike retail stuff, our name is THE ADDRESS, THE LOCATION. Therefore it's even more important.

My search continues. I'll post some of my ideas tomorrow once I register the domains :P

Not to be overlooked: having keywords in your URL can really help your ranking in search engines.

Andy

Originally posted by nvwillj
Hmmmm....how many other products have names that include a generic identifier? Chrysler, Nike, Timex, Kodak, Green Giant - seems to me that this is a phenomenon exclusive to web hosting. Might be some good reasons for it, but offhand, I suspect it's a phase the web has grown out of. Actually, I don't think there really are good reasons for it. The majority of the thousands of webhosting companies have been named with little or no marketing consideration given to the name; and no focus group research or surveys. The majority of webhosts have the word "host" in the name simply because the majority of those that came before them did.

But if you look at the big players, with the exception (I'm sure there are more, I'm going off the top of my head) of DellHost, none of them have that four-letter word. And in their case, it's for a logical reason: keeping the strong brand identity while marking a separate unit.

Going back to the original question, certainly the name makes a difference, just like it does in every other business. In most cases people can't even put a finger on why it is that they feel what they do about a certain name, but it absolutely can affect the confidence people feel in a company.