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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Dec 2006
    Location
    Cardiff, Wales
    Posts
    803

    Am I too cheap? VPS?

    Hey guys,

    Last week i launched my new business model, completely refurbishing my site and our product line and thought that our VPS would be a huge sell out at the prices listed on our site + the 75% on a single payment term (either month or year) for WHM Users.

    Obviously we not going to sell hundreds overnight. But during our first week we planed to sell at least 30 VPS, but ended up only selling 12.

    As web hosts and potential customers, are we too cheap in what we provide or should we just wait for things to kick up?

    For some reason we thought customers would have loved the we actually automatically backup your VPS each and every night and restore it within 30min feature and also free offsite ftp storage to match disk space (rarely seen with VPS), but obviously this hasn't seemed to attract many customers as well.

    Is the VPS market really just a waiting game or are we too cheap, expensive etc etc?


    Many thanks for your replys.

    Best,
    Nathaniel
    SIP Trunking and VoIP Lines, Numbering (DIDs and DDIs), Low Cost Minute add-ons, Secure SIP and VoIP. Business and Enterprise Grade Quality, Low Cost and Highly Competitive. Available at: https://www.voipyonder.com/

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Mar 2009
    Location
    Toronto, Canada
    Posts
    2,570
    I guess it comes down to how well you spread your word to attract clients. You'll need to catch your visitors' attention with these features and make sure they'll find it and will know about it. It's good that you've refurbished your site and I took a look at it, it looks pretty good but in my opinion, it doesn't really "scream" all the attractive features you're offering, at least not for the VPS products.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Feb 2008
    Location
    Houston, Texas, USA
    Posts
    3,262
    Hi Nathaniel,

    I'm not able to pull your website. Hopefully it's busy with new orders . Anyway, I've found that competing against other providers based on price and resources doesn't necessarily mean customers will sign up in droves. You have to have a unique selling point. Something no one else in the market has.

    For example, I feel we're distinguishing ourselves by introducing a new product almost no one has (managed vps failover across facilities). It's tough to offer this product unless you're a physical operation and have capital to enter colo markets and have presence in several facilities (read non-reseller).

    Anyway, I sincerely wish you good luck with your venture.

    Best
    UNIXy - Fully Managed Servers and Clusters - Established in 2006
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  4. #4
    Join Date
    Dec 2006
    Location
    Cardiff, Wales
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    803
    Thanks you guys for both your responsives, i will take them on board. UNIXy, may i ask who your ISP is. Our site is fully up and running at the moment and the last downtime we have for our site was 8 months ago.

    Also just done a host-tracker.com to see if there any connectivity issues to our site and they seem to be loading fine.

    Best,
    Nathaniel
    SIP Trunking and VoIP Lines, Numbering (DIDs and DDIs), Low Cost Minute add-ons, Secure SIP and VoIP. Business and Enterprise Grade Quality, Low Cost and Highly Competitive. Available at: https://www.voipyonder.com/

  5. #5
    I noticed a typo on the front page of your site under the VPS's. It says 384mb Garuanteed Ram instead of Guaranteed.

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Dec 2006
    Location
    Cardiff, Wales
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    Quote Originally Posted by jwong12 View Post
    I noticed a typo on the front page of your site under the VPS's. It says 384mb Garuanteed Ram instead of Guaranteed.
    Thanks for that, i will get that sorted first thing when im back in the office.

    Best,
    SIP Trunking and VoIP Lines, Numbering (DIDs and DDIs), Low Cost Minute add-ons, Secure SIP and VoIP. Business and Enterprise Grade Quality, Low Cost and Highly Competitive. Available at: https://www.voipyonder.com/

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Feb 2008
    Location
    Houston, Texas, USA
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    3,262
    Quote Originally Posted by CymraegWalesHosting View Post
    UNIXy, may i ask who your ISP is. Our site is fully up and running at the moment and the last downtime we have for our site was 8 months ago.
    You are right. I just used an secondary connection and it worked fine. I'm coming from att's 70.245.x.x. It must have been recently released by ARIN so it's a BOGON to most static firewalls still.
    UNIXy - Fully Managed Servers and Clusters - Established in 2006
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  8. #8
    Join Date
    Jun 2003
    Location
    United States of America
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    1,847
    Another typo in your second to last post responsives should be responsiveness or whatever you meant to say. Typos are one place to look out for, that is why I use firefox for a lot of things I do.

    But my main thinking right now is with the economy things are just tight to a degree anyways anywhere you go. And just being creative and innovative is one of the directions I try to go most. Don't follow the competition necessarily, your idea on instant backups is cool. I also have never gotten to doing this webhosting thing full time yet either and always just do it in my spare time growing slowly. Meaning I am relying on my backup plan but if your unemployed with lots of time on your hands I don't think its a terrible thing to spend time on by any means.
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  9. #9
    Join Date
    Dec 2006
    Location
    Cardiff, Wales
    Posts
    803
    To be honest, i've been in this the hosting only 4-5 years and really although not well known here, we are well known with our local council (Rhondda Cynon Taf) and various other companies to setup systems and configurations etc for websites.

    We are also currently in the design process of building our own 45,000sq ft N+1 N4 DC with just short of a total 600gbit from Linx + with multiple direct connections to Paris, New York and Miami (we will be partially be an Exchange.) As there's a backbone plan to upgrade the internal traffic + external (in/out) of the UK, but we cant say to much as thats all shh shh at the moment. But i will mention more on that once our main funding starts flowing through.

    Regarding the Typos, i do need to sit down and get that sorted. I think when your working through the night fueled by PG Tips tea, i think spelling goes out the windows so you have to be careful, but i will get that sorted.

    Many thanks,
    SIP Trunking and VoIP Lines, Numbering (DIDs and DDIs), Low Cost Minute add-ons, Secure SIP and VoIP. Business and Enterprise Grade Quality, Low Cost and Highly Competitive. Available at: https://www.voipyonder.com/

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Sep 2007
    Posts
    140
    Hi,

    well, I suspect that those who did sign up were on a broadband access.

    Your site looks natty, but it took - for me - roughly 4 minutes to load on my ISDN access (yep, I can't get anything else and I pay per minute to boot!). The front page has 1213 KB, which is a whopping 1+MB! Of these 1173 KB are graphics.

    Additionally the site is fixed width, which means that I have to scroll left-right to completely see it on a 1024x768 resolution screen.

    I'd consider both to be major mistakes.

    Someone who might be looking for a host providing fast loading times will be put off by such a huge loading time of the host's own site and just click on before even starting to browse your information or even if he will do so, it might predispose him against your service. Additionally, someone might either entirely miss info placed at the edges, or get angered by having to scroll too much and consider this layman-like.

    Indeed, unless a host has a site teeming with animated gifs and blinking blitzes or one which auto-loads some music or one which is flash based (all reasons to immediately leave a host site for me as a customer), I pay practically zero attention to natty or showy design. I need info, I need it fast, I need it exactly where I would expect it and the site ought to load blazingly fast. If this is achieved via an austere and simple design, no problem - indeed then I get the impression that the host knows what I came onto his site for. It needs to work, be free of typos and bad grammar, every info ought to be concise, and I want the price list and the comparison of plans, including a comparison of features just one click away from the initial home page.

    So, would I sign on after surfing to your site? Probably not, because surfing it is like wading through molasses and when I am shopping for a hosting provider I don't want to be held up.

    So, you might want to rethink your design. Round edges and color gradients might be cute, but if they come at the expense of 1+MB of loading slowly graphics, they aren't doing the job

    C.

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Dec 2006
    Location
    Cardiff, Wales
    Posts
    803
    Quote Originally Posted by chortaj View Post
    Hi,

    well, I suspect that those who did sign up were on a broadband access.

    Your site looks natty, but it took - for me - roughly 4 minutes to load on my ISDN access (yep, I can't get anything else and I pay per minute to boot!). The front page has 1213 KB, which is a whopping 1+MB! Of these 1173 KB are graphics.

    Additionally the site is fixed width, which means that I have to scroll left-right to completely see it on a 1024x768 resolution screen.

    I'd consider both to be major mistakes.

    Someone who might be looking for a host providing fast loading times will be put off by such a huge loading time of the host's own site and just click on before even starting to browse your information or even if he will do so, it might predispose him against your service. Additionally, someone might either entirely miss info placed at the edges, or get angered by having to scroll too much and consider this layman-like.

    Indeed, unless a host has a site teeming with animated gifs and blinking blitzes or one which auto-loads some music or one which is flash based (all reasons to immediately leave a host site for me as a customer), I pay practically zero attention to natty or showy design. I need info, I need it fast, I need it exactly where I would expect it and the site ought to load blazingly fast. If this is achieved via an austere and simple design, no problem - indeed then I get the impression that the host knows what I came onto his site for. It needs to work, be free of typos and bad grammar, every info ought to be concise, and I want the price list and the comparison of plans, including a comparison of features just one click away from the initial home page.

    So, would I sign on after surfing to your site? Probably not, because surfing it is like wading through molasses and when I am shopping for a hosting provider I don't want to be held up.

    So, you might want to rethink your design. Round edges and color gradients might be cute, but if they come at the expense of 1+MB of loading slowly graphics, they aren't doing the job

    C.

    Thank you for your long answer . Its very much appreciated. After careful recompression of images, we have been able to take the home page from 1.3mb to 381kb, so i think that is a much bigger improvement. Also we have been able to use the gzip code on our site and have been able to save the page size by 79% which is great.


    Best,
    Nathaniel
    SIP Trunking and VoIP Lines, Numbering (DIDs and DDIs), Low Cost Minute add-ons, Secure SIP and VoIP. Business and Enterprise Grade Quality, Low Cost and Highly Competitive. Available at: https://www.voipyonder.com/

  12. #12
    Join Date
    Sep 2007
    Posts
    140
    Hi Nathaniel.

    loads MUCH, MUCH better now Gives a totally different impression now, much more ... brisk

    For an eventual later site overhauling I'd keep in mind to use a flexible width layout then and you'll be well set.

    C.

  13. #13
    Join Date
    Dec 2006
    Location
    Cardiff, Wales
    Posts
    803
    Quote Originally Posted by chortaj View Post
    Hi Nathaniel.

    loads MUCH, MUCH better now Gives a totally different impression now, much more ... brisk

    For an eventual later site overhauling I'd keep in mind to use a flexible width layout then and you'll be well set.

    C.
    Thanks for that. What is was, when we were designing our menu, we used the full uncompressed PNG images which were 100kb + (25 total) and because our office is on a 20mbit, we dont really notice any speed issues,

    But thanks for everything guys.

    I guess its just a waiting game for our customers to start rolling in (***I Hope!***)

    Many thanks,
    Nathaniel
    SIP Trunking and VoIP Lines, Numbering (DIDs and DDIs), Low Cost Minute add-ons, Secure SIP and VoIP. Business and Enterprise Grade Quality, Low Cost and Highly Competitive. Available at: https://www.voipyonder.com/

  14. #14
    Dude 12 clients in your first week is amazing so stop beating yourself up about it. I usually tell people to wait a month before they even get their first customer - and you have gotten 12 in a week so good job on that.

    As far as lowering your price, I don't recommend it. Keep that sucker as high as you can without effecting conversion rates. Otherwise you will have to double your work just to see the same return.
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  15. #15
    Hi, Nat: Nice site and good colors, but just a suggestion:

    The graphic "boxtop_flat.png" is consuming your most valuable real estate above the fold.... and it's just a black/blurry image of some LEDs. Why not put something clickable like a call to action/more information?

  16. #16
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Posts
    332
    Quote Originally Posted by dbbrock1 View Post
    Dude 12 clients in your first week is amazing so stop beating yourself up about it. I usually tell people to wait a month before they even get their first customer - and you have gotten 12 in a week so good job on that.

    As far as lowering your price, I don't recommend it. Keep that sucker as high as you can without effecting conversion rates. Otherwise you will have to double your work just to see the same return.
    I think you misread what he said, he has been in business 4-5 years and is just running a promotion for the vps's

    but 12 is pretty good, one of the things i noticed was the phone number at the top, it is partially covered, im not sure if it supposed to be but someone could see it as images overlapping or when text overlaps. Another thing i would work on is some of the font color, it sort of blends with the background in some places and can make it hard to read, especially if the customers vision is a little bad.
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