Getting Clients

galwayjohn89

I have recently set up a hosting business and am struggling to get clients. My prices would be on the lower end to entice customers but as I get more popular my prices will be increased but current customers will remain on their prices. This is the norm within the industry.

So was wondering would any one have any good ideas to get customers to sign up?

Random

there's so many out there in the business. whats unique about your business that would make me use you over someone else ?

galwayjohn89

Well, Irish Servers, Irish Customer support, smaller business so I get to know the clients needs better, cheaper, faster servers and anytime moneyback guarantee would be the main ones.

Axwell

For starters you will have the problem that you are unknown, there are numerous other Irish hosting companies with Irish servers and support etc that are known and trusted.

Next I would assume you aren't a registered domain reseller for the IEDR so you cant do domains, unless you are organising them through one of the other resellers but that means very little markup if any for you. People tend to get both together so if you are just doing hosting you are going to struggle on that front too.

When it comes to hosting reliability is they key. Are you reselling someone else's hosting? Because if you are not then can you guarantee the uptime others offer? Being cheaper wouldnt sell it for me to be honest, sure price is a factor but for me I am using a hosting company to host clients websites and emails. If it isn't reliable it falls back on me and my business so I am not going to risk going with a small company for the sake of a few quid when they don't have a proven track record. I would prefer to pay the few quid extra and have reliability for me and my clients. Obviously though to get the track record you need the clients though so its a catch 22 but its a tough business to be trying to break into to be honest.

galwayjohn89

I can resell IE domain names and am quite competitive on prices. €10 for first year then €20 a year after. I don't aim to make much money on domains but I do on hosting. I am currently a reseller for a large Irish hosting company so I can guarantee 99.9% uptime but as I grow I will be looking at my own servers etc but currently it makes no economic sense to do that.

I understand that hosting needs to be reliable and thats the main reason I am having trouble getting people to sign up. I need to build a brand and reputation but in order to do that I need clients which is catch 22 as you said!

AnCatDubh

what is your target market?

what are the core elements of your marketing plan at present?

jmcc

Vuzuggu wrote: »

I have recently set up a hosting business and am struggling to get clients.

Have you quantified your market, identified your competition and identified your customer niche? (I know the answers to the first two parts but just asking if you do.)

My prices would be on the lower end to entice customers but as I get more popular my prices will be increased but current customers will remain on their prices. This is the norm within the industry.

Not really. The large players can floor you with a free offer and you just don't have the resources to compete. Yellow pack hosting (retail hosting) is a very competitive market and most retail hosters plateau once they reach a certain level.

Regards...jmcc

fishbun

So you're a value-added seller but you're not having much luck communicating your value proposition!

None of your unique selling points struck a chord with me. Customer service isn't a deciding factor for anyone (as long as you're not doing it wrong... godaddy). It's enough to promise a quick turnaround for support emails. No one wants to waste hours on tech support, no matter how polite the service, but they do need an affordable hosting service that just works.

I said an affordable service by the way, and not cheap, as people are generally willing to pay for services they derive value from. I don't think I'd switch my sites even if you could promise me completely free hosting, unless you could also convince me on reliability and ease of setup.

Sure, you can target specific forums/communities with coupon codes as a promotion, but don't think that undercutting the competition or reducing your already razor thin margins will have customers beating down your doors. What you need is to find a scalable and repeatable customer acquisition strategy - be it online ads, SEO, newspaper adverts or referral schemes.

I have a couple of questions that might be worth asking yourself. It'd be great if you could answer in this thread (for my own nosiness) but even if you kick them around with a friend I believe it's worth doing.

• Why did you pick this business? Do you have enough expertise? Is there an anything you are passionate about learning that would open new markets for you? Can you do something your customers can't do but value highly (SSH'ing, write sexy bash scripts, security)

• Why would people choose your service rather than directly going to your provider/competitors? What can you offer them to make their lives easier/better/sexier?

• What are the best Irish/UK companies not doing that even the worst US based hosting providers can do (VPS, SVN or others)

• Why do people make the leap and buy hosting from a particular provider? How long do you imagine they remain with that provider? What causes them to change?

• What are the major sources of frustration for customers of your competitors? What do you offer that overcomes that?

• What substitutes do people resort to? Why wouldn't they just spin up their own AWS, Linode, whatever on their own?

• What do you understand about hosting that other companies just don't get?

• What are the benefits of your service? Not your boring features (Irish owned, number of MySQL DBs, etc.) but the emotional drivers behind buying from you? Convenience? Reliability? Winning smile?

• How will you make money? What are the projections for the next 3 years? How much do you have to spend on advertising? What's the revenue breakdown between products?

• How in love are you with running a business? Accounting? Do you know your cost per acquisition, product margins, cash flow requirements etc

• Does your reseller package limit what you can sell? How many customers do you need before you buy your own hardware? Why should you buy hardware instead of hosting virtually?

• Who is your target market? Personal, Small Business, Enterprise? Each has very different requirements. Can you drill down further into a niche (e.g. bloggers, bring offline stores online) Also screw how long enterprise sale cycles take :mad:

I have a couple more but this is enough homework as it is. I'll throw you a bone and say what I would do if I owned a hosting company. Feel free to argue back, brainstorm, or even tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about (I don't!).


I'd target personal websites and small businesses. Make the packages really simple and price it annually. Remove confusion and all friction. Have a clean and nicely designed site/client log in area.

- Starter - Bloggers, hobbyists and startups (€40ish)

- Professional - Online merchants and professional bloggers (€100ish)

I'd rent a VPS and sysadmin this crap out of it myself. Offer unlimited storage/transfer cos no one will ever hit it, but politely ask to move to dedicated if they ever exceed your comfort zone. No one is going to be hosting Facebook on it just to screw you over. If anyone needs more than that they'd be better off self hosting anyway.

Offer all the usual suspects - cPanel, Fantastico, SSL etc. You could implement SiteBuilder or even better would be have an affiliate-stuffed gallery of themeforest templates.

A big area where you can add value would be writing really clear installation guides or tutorial videos. My business would involve targeting first time buyers who don't know their arse from their elbow. Write separate articles for literally everything you're involved in - installing WordPress, FTPing, Google Apps etc. It will also provide you with a nice SEO boost. Hold a local business' hand for setting up a FOSS shopping cart and uploading the template and they'll love you forever.

If you can articulate to a customer your major advantages and benefits, and show them how easy it is to swap hosts ("one click transfer!" or "follow this 5 minute tutorial to save hassle/money") you'll be rolling in it.


As for where to find them, I'd usually tell people to go for a measurable CPM or CPC model, however I imagine web hosts are pretty savvy & scary competitive when it comes to online advertising. Local clients will be great because won’t switch for the sake of €1/month or spam you with support tickets. If I were to break it down in order of importance for a web host, I would concentrate on the following:

Local
- Newspaper ads with excellent copywriting and call to action
- Optimise your webpage for local searches
- Company letterhead + business cards
- Chamber of Commerce networking
- Meetups for entrepreneurs
- Everyone else will say hook up with local web designers but they should be host their own. The ones that don't won't have the volume to be worth it. Do think of other partnerships

Online Forum/Communities
- Cheap banner ads from Google Doubleclick adplanner
- Paid sticky posts
- Offer promos as community specific code (30% off or wrap domain name cost into professional tier)


SEO
- Pretty much every low margin affiliate will use scammy black hat techniques to rank higher in Google, but there's still no reason why you shouldn't implement the SEOmoz beginner guide and the Warrior Forum FAQs.
- Use google keyword tool to identify long tail keywords and write articles for these.
- Guest blog on medium trafficked sites, build relationships online with bloggers/forum posters and convince them how much awesome you can offer them.

Pay-per-click
- Experiment and iterate with adwords and facebook campaigns. Go with longtail searches (i.e. not broad terms but stuff like "reliable Irish web host") and specific demographics on FB (business owners >40).
- Click through rates in general are super low (like 2% - 4%) and conversion rates on your site are similar (<5%) so you literally have to get it in front of hundreds of people to make a sale. See also: reasons why undercutting competition is bad - you don't see the customer acquisition cost.

Reviews & Testimonials
- Both on your website and on any forums you post on. I wouldn't put a lot of faith in your handpicked ones, but if I see hundreds of happy customers on a forum thread I will be impressed.
- Word of mouth is good too I guess, but really hard to manage and a bit too passive for my tastes.



I'd probably seek to move out of the retail hosting side over time and supplement with niche offerings - online (TO THE CLOUD!) file storage, backups, game servers, VPN tunnelling (Netflix, Hulu access for students), even enterprise (uggg) because there's no barrier to entry to what you're doing (a credit card and a reseller agreement). Your passion and abilities will dictate how far you can take it, but there's still a lot of money if you do it right. Any questions, comments, I'll pop back in on Monday evening to reply.

Stay hungry!

galwayjohn89

fishbun, thank you for that. It's given me a lot of food for thought and I think I am going to restructure my hosting plans now to simplify them got some business cards on the way and have a adwords campaign which has bought in a few sales.

Got listed on a few web hosting directories so it seems like things are starting to pick up now traffic wise. Just need to convert them to sales.

jmcc

Vuzuggu wrote: »

fishbun, thank you for that. It's given me a lot of food for thought and I think I am going to restructure my hosting plans now to simplify them got some business cards on the way and have a adwords campaign which has bought in a few sales.

Got listed on a few web hosting directories so it seems like things are starting to pick up now traffic wise. Just need to convert them to sales.

Just so you know, the hosting business is cyclic. You may be able to take advantage of the student web dev market (early Summer) if you still have some contacts in college/university etc. Make sure that your brand is protected and passes the phone test.

Regards...jmcc