Should you have more than one hosting company at once to generate more revenue? Would it be harder to maintain? Would 3 hosting companies do better than 1 or would it be harder to advertise? Would it be wise to hire people to advertise for you if you had more than one company? Your thoughts? I am thinking about opening one or two more while keeping this company open.

Having different brands to target different markets is far better than trying to lump it all into one business. The scattershot approach isn't something I'd go for.

Whether or not you'd need to take help on is only something you can decide though. :)

Managing multiple businesses can be a task especially from an Administration perspective (advertising, infrastructure, branding, accounting etc). You're basically multiplying your costs by 3 and I think it would be best to focus on a single brand and build it up instead of juggling between multiple brands unless you have the resources to do so.

As previously mentioned, you could do very well for yourself by having several businesses in their own specific market segments but you need a lot of resources to accomplish this effectively.

Keep in mind that if you are wanting to truly offer them as separate brands then you need to think about keeping everything properly separated and do not rely on one company to carry the other(s).

Keep in mind with the multiple brands some things will carry over and they could potentially use some of the same resources. For example:

Infrastructure for example backups, monitoring systems and miscellanous tools or servers that are not specific to one brand.

You could also potentially use the same staff across multiple brands depending on how both are setup.

Finally another key point peopel forget is buying power. If you already have a brand paying 25% less than the base price on licenses and servers you're not going to pay the normal cost for the new brand. You're going to get those discounts and potentially help get even further discounts as both brands grow.

A lot of it though assumes your current brand is of a decent size and has staff and a decent number of assets. If it's all one many operation right now adding another company wouldn't really be a great idea.

Not sure it worth doing so. What I've done is as I've got a hot domain name like: citynamehosting.com but already have a hosting site before I've got the new one, I build a folder under the main site (mainhostingsite.com/cityname/, this folder will be specially made for my citynamehosting.com offering hosting plans that are lower than main page, this is for local businesses, I then promote my link on classified ads, geo targetted forum, blogs, adsense...
So when they are looking for a hosting they ll be redirect to the special folder with hosting plans customized to the local area. Some will probably check the main hosting site (mainhostingsite.com) and see that prices are higher than the link given, it make them a bit VIP this way and they subscribe to hosting plan. I don't have to manage 2 different companies or servers.

One parent company, multiple brands, everything else (billing, support, purchase, and so on) centralised at the parent company can give you better returns and bigger status too.

If you are planing for long term then i will recommend on consetrating in one brand.

Having different brands to target different markets is far better than trying to lump it all into one business.

It can work well in that same market too, if it's a very competitive one. Bluehost did it, with the launch of their Hostmonster brand (and less successfully with their Fastdomain one).

Endurance International Group has some 25-30 brands, many of which operate in the same, budget hosting market. However, by having so many of them, often several of them are listed in the "top ten" and other affiliate sites. If a top 10 list has your company, through its different brands, listed 3 times, you just got a theoretical 3 times greater chance of securing a sale, compared to a company having just one.

But, that's probably only an advantage when you get to a point where advertising opportunities are getting scarce for your 1 brand. It's also good if you can add a twist to it. For example, in the last year or so EIG has been pushing the FatCow brand quite a bit. It's a funny site they made there, with their "udder" and "moo" references, and it's different from their other brands, as well as most other hosting companies sales approaches (maybe Dreamhost has a bit of that amusing, tongue in cheek thing at times).

So, would I do it? Yes, given the right circumstances. It's not a good idea for any company, or at all points in time.

It can work well in that same market too, if it's a very competitive one. Bluehost did it, with the launch of their Hostmonster brand (and less successfully with their Fastdomain one).


I might have been a bit unclear in my post. I was in support of having multiple brands under one parent company.

What I was against was trying to sell too wide a range of services through one brand name and appearing to be a jack of all trades.

We have one parent company and more than one brand and it's certainly going to do us good in the long term future. =)

I think it would help if you had multiple brands for your different target markets. But I think you should start them gradually. Not all at once. Once your first brand is comfortably going, start to think about the next. It would be a lot of work to start all of them at the same time.

I think 1 well-branded company with with region and demographic-specific marketing is the way to go

As always and with all things/options we have in business, there are some advantages and disadvantages associated with it. The same happen with this option. The major advantage I can count is that, OP will get multiple brands/company or website and if one does not work, may be another one could get good business. And the major disadvantage, it will be tedious, time consuming and resource intensive to operate multiple business. If anyone can manage to do so, it will ultimately be an major advantage.
Thanks

Even I would say focus on one and it would bloom;)