Hello All --

Hey... is "Hosting", the term I mean, dead?

What I mean is that when you combine the trend toward low-cost or free hosting offers with the fact that most prospects do not understand what "hosting" means... is it time for the term to go away so we can sort of "repackage" what we offer?

I've sold hosting for 8 years now, and 5 different companies. I worked as Managing Director for a local web hosting company. All along the way, I found many customers who:

• Do not know what "hosting" means... "I just want a website," they say
• Never once took a look at their control panel and understood what potential CGI scripts could do for them -- few even set-up email forwarding

Sure... we could continue to "educate" them. Spend several hours instructing them on best use of their control panels, how to install Nuke-like CMS programs, etc. -- but would they pay for that, and if not, can we cover that expense?

Maybe there's another way to go about this. Products are "repackaged" all the time by marketing companies who see sales slowing, or simply do a study and find a new color, or headline, or name increases sales.

So this is to get us brainstorming... do you agree that we could "repackage" the "hosting" concept... and what would it be?

Yours - Scott

Yes, it definitly could be 'repackaged'. Hosting companies don't just sell hosting any more. Customers need more, such as SSL, merchant accounts, site builders etc. This really has nothing to do with hosting and more to do with the tools to create a successfull site.

Customers need more, such as SSL, merchant accounts, site builders etc.

Then I would simply say that the definition of hosting has changed over time. We don't actually need another word.

Good point Dan, maybe a new term is not needed. "Hosting" has morphed into more then just website hosting and now includes everything one needs to put a website online.

No matter what it's called, the hosting industry has definitly changed over the years.

Hello Guys...

Hey... thanks for your views. I DO think the term "hosting" is dead... in fact, I think it was dead on arrival.

Why?

People who are not technically inclined (small business folks) just don't understand it, and so don't value it.

Why not sell a business mission solution like an online Portal, and just call what we used to know as "hosting" -- "rent". Isn't that what we're really selling? Clients DO NOT CARE about the computer housing their site... they care about the application that is their website and how it is helping their business.

Ever try quoting all of those server stats to a prospective small business client? Who cares about 15000 Storage -- what does that mean to the customer? Why does a small business with 8 employees care if it gets 1000 e-mails? How many of your clients understand autoresponders, let alone use them? See what I mean?

I think we're in search of a new word to replace hosting -- customers just don't care about it, and when we find something they DO care about we will see our sales rise.

Yours - Scott

Originally Posted by picklezone

Hello Guys...

Ever try quoting all of those server stats to a prospective small business client? Who cares about 15000 Storage -- what does that mean to the customer? Why does a small business with 8 employees care if it gets 1000 e-mails? How many of your clients understand autoresponders, let alone use them? See what I mean?

I think we're in search of a new word to replace hosting -- customers just don't care about it, and when we find something they DO care about we will see our sales rise.

Yours - Scott

I think you're spot on about small business customers not caring.

Why should they?

If they need electricity or water or telephone to their premises they couldn't care less about the technical aspects of the service, as long as it works and delivers what they want.

I think one problem with websites is that a lot of the people who design them, and especially sole trader or small partnership designers, are technically or graphically good but too focused on and excited by the technical and graphical aspects. The customer usually wouldn't know and couldn't care less if the feature on his website is a technical triumph by the designer. All the customer wants is something that works. Videos and audio and fade-ins and fade-outs and dancing text and all sorts of other bells and whistles are, in my view, a nuisance on most business websites and about as much use as the entry pages that used to be common, too many of which are still about on even some large organisations' sites. The reader wants a website that loads quickly; is visually attractive; logical and easy to navigate; and conveys information clearly and legibly. An awful lot of technically brilliant websites fail some or all those criteria.

The same problem of the supplier being obsessed with technical features which are unimportant to the end user applies to hosting. What does it matter if there's a squillion MB or GB of storage or traffic? As indicated in the quote, who can possibly use 1,000 email addresses? Or even 50? Or even 5 in a sole trader business? Most small business sites couldn't use more than a tiny fraction of what's available on most hosts. Most small businesses that could (as distinct from do) have websites just need a static presence, like a telephone directory entry, with no ecommerce and no changes although a few, like real estate agents, need to be able to change them constantly to insert updated information.

I think hosts have got carried away with competing on the basis of space and traffic and a whole range of things related to meaningless numbers and unuseable features that might impress some technically-minded people but are meaningless to the vast bulk of small business end-users.

Given that a lot of small businesses retain a designer to set up their website and that after setting it up on a host the designer disappears leaving the customer on his own, I think there's a market for hosts who support such customers with the simple feature of storing a back-up and being able to restore the website if it gets damaged (such as by the customer fiddling with it). That way the customer is guaranteed that the website they've paid for will always be up without the need to locate the designer (who is just as likely to have left school / university / got a job or otherwise gone missing in action) to restore their website. This also locks the customer into the host as they won't have the knowledge or skills to swap their site elsewhere.

The other thing that would be good is hosts with realistic levels of storage and traffic for small businesses on servers that don't run hungry customers, which they could sell at rates below the lowest current rates without any risk of overselling. In the end they'd get a lot more customers on a given server for more profit without having to pack in a whole lot of unnecessary features.

People do not need to pay for web hosting anyway, to many n00b friendly websites can offer a good finish what does not take long.

Personally i'm working on a system that can offer unlimted space and bandwidth...and i think i can do it free!

Originally Posted by doggy

I think you're spot on about small business customers not caring...

I think hosts have got carried away with competing on the basis of space and traffic and a whole range of things related to meaningless numbers and unuseable features that might impress some technically-minded people but are meaningless to the vast bulk of small business end-users.

The other thing that would be good is hosts with realistic levels of storage and traffic for small businesses on servers that don't run hungry customers, which they could sell at rates below the lowest current rates without any risk of overselling. In the end they'd get a lot more customers on a given server for more profit without having to pack in a whole lot of unnecessary features.

Hello -

Hey... thanks for the well thought-out reply. I think that most customers have no idea how much space their website takes up on their host, and that a huge amount of space, transfer, emails, forwards, etc. is left unused in most cases for smaller businesses. Why advertise all that if it is not used, and not understood?

Our colleague who replied under your post suggested he can do all of this for free -- not sure why, though. I mean, it does cost some overhead, and you do have to log some hours doing tech. support.

To use a theater analogy... I think we need to start selling the "play" -- not the "lighting" and "set-up" features.

Years ago, I visited a theater and interviewed the folks who work backstage for an article in a local newspaper. I never forgot what the lighting technician said to me after showing me miles of cables, scaffolds, sophisticated switching and programming equipment. He smiled, and said, "If my job is done right, noone even knows about it."

He's right. When we pay for a play, we don't really care that 1300 lights were used, with an intel light switching board, etc. We just want the play.

And our clients... just want a website that helps them meet their business mission.

How should we do that? Let's keep the brainstorm going.

Yours - Scott

My main site has about 90 pages, each with between one and five images of various sizes, and has used not quite 33MB of the 500MB available. They're all HTML/CSS pages with no flash etc but they're exactly what a lot of small businesses would have on their pages.

On that basis, an average single page website will use about 1/3MB and a four page one about 1&1/3MB. It follows that 2MB would be more than enough for the vast bulk of small businesses.

So, my host could fit 250 businesses on the 500MB nominally allocated to me. I'm paying US$2.95 a month for my allocation and I reckon that's a steal, and so would any business for a website. My host could make $737.50 from my 500MB in 250 x 2MB lots at $2.95 a month. Or flog them off at .99 cents and still make nearly $250 instead of just $2.95. I think it is quite feasible for rogem002 to sell them for nothing (athough revenue has to come from something else like advertising to justify the exercise), but I'd prefer to pay my host $2.95 a month and rent the space out for $737.50 a month in 2MB slices.

I don't know anything about the hosting business but it's apparent that space isn't the main cost and prices are going down steadily. I don't know that they can get much cheaper.

If hosts want to get customers in the future where they won't be able to sell on huge gigs of space and traffic nor on price because the prices will almost all be rock bottom, they have to come up with something else to distinguish their service from the rest.

Hosting is probably going to be a market that will become too competitive for the small players in time. The market will then fragment into the top line hosts who can sell at premium prices to corporations and other clients who will pay for perceived quality and reliability and security, while the rest of the market will be served by budget operators.

I think if you want to position yourself to be a host for small businesses you could rent large amounts of space from one of the premium operators currently around and, by selling realistic small amounts of a couple of MB, give your clients top quality hosting while still undercutting a lot of the budget operators and resellers currently around.

The problem is whether a host will accept, say, 250 domains in 500MB. Maybe somebody with knowledge of the hosting industry can say whether that's feasible or not.

i dont think its 'dead' as such.. just tht a lot more people know about it and a website is not really a 'unique' concept anymore as well...

I just want to point out that "space" is just one part of the service provided within a typical hosting package. Bandwidth, database connectivity and other services can and will severely limit a servers capacity to serve.
In other words, a web host can not simply fill up 2 or 3 hard drives attached to a server just because the accounts will fit physically on the drives. One or two busy websites can tax a server's capacity to serve while physically only using a small amount of disc space.
Therefore, one should not assume that a web host is able to fit hundreds of small sites on a server just because they are small.
Just my 2 cents worth...

its can be replace with the word website solutions, internet solutions.
Really at this time period computers are evovling and more and more stupid non computer people start to use their computers, they then hear, i make $1 mil a year from my internet site. and they would pay for anything! Thats where the big companies come in they can spend money on advertising and you get this problem where teh small and medium honest companies dont make money because of the big company lies.
I think this is a great post. Rep Point me!

lol
James there is no such thing as the best.
Some customers prefer cheap payments good everything else, some think the more you pay the better you get, and thats true in most cases. Big companies suck. They are to much on about law and protection so its hell, medium companies are like big comapanies but they value you more but small companies value customers the most, as they lose on they might not get profit for that month and so on....

Hello All -

I liked what RepoMan said about selling "solutions." The important thing about web hosting is what it can DO for a client, rather than how it works... from the clients perspective that is. When you really want to sell a sailboard, for example, you tell the prospect how much he will enjoy sailing on it. How the board is made with styrofoam, resin, etc. is not as important to him as what he will DO with it.

Yours - Scott

Good thread!

I agree hosting is sold too much on a "I'll give you 100000000MBs of space" basis. Clients need to be educated and informed as to how they can get the most from their hosting... but that's not the host's job. If every host did that, they wouldn't have any time - it's sometimes bad enough responding to support tickets alone.

Picklezone, you may be onto something here. It's a nice concept you've got - just delivering what the client needs. Unfortunately, with hosting, most clients want to hear that they can have four million autoresponders etc. just in case.

TP added to picklezone for the good thread and doggy...

Interesting discussion on the future of "hosting." The insight into the changes that will need to be implemented are, I beleive germane. BTW, the comments about unlimited space, and transfer for "free" is very odd--what business model it that from?

I've used a variety of web hosts including some of the big guys (I had decent service with http://www.ipowerweb.com as an example). But I've gone to a mid-sized company that gives solid hosting service and adds a tech support function that takes REAL headaches away from me--they allow my clients to call them directly and handle such pain in the *** tasks as walking them thru setting up Outlook Express to use their mail. Email calls from some clients were my biggest headache--now my host acts as my representative, telling the customer that they have been hired by me to handle these activities (true). I get to stick with waht I do best and they take care of things in which they are very skilled. Nice service.

Originally Posted by edgarv

But I've gone to a mid-sized company that gives solid hosting service and adds a tech support function that takes REAL headaches away from me--they allow my clients to call them directly and handle such pain in the *** tasks as walking them thru setting up Outlook Express to use their mail. Email calls from some clients were my biggest headache--now my host acts as my representative, telling the customer that they have been hired by me to handle these activities (true). I get to stick with waht I do best and they take care of things in which they are very skilled. Nice service.

I'm in two minds about this sort of support.

One mind. I give my clients detailed info on setting up for the dominant version of Outlook / Express email but (rather more delicately than what follows) tell them that I'm setting up and hosting their sites, not running a support service for every email client on the planet so if they can't work out how to do it from my info they'll have to get support from their email client software supplier. I think it's my obligation as someone who's setting up and hosting their sites to provide reasonable instructions on how to make their email and other features of what I'm supplying work for them, but it can be a right royal PITA when dealing with people who think that I should be an oracle on every bit of software that was ever developed, and every version of it.

Other mind. It could be a lot better if someone else took over all that sort of stuff, from email to how to work cPanel (which ain't always all that clearly documented for people who manage to find the documentation) and all the other stuff that most people go through trying to get a site to work for the first time or three.

There could be a big opportunity for a dedicated service that provides all this stuff to which hosting sites etc could link for a fee, as although many hosts provide various levels of info on these topics they are often not too useful for the novices who will be the ones who need the support.

Maybe such a service already exists. If so, I wouldn't mind a link to check it out.

The relief from fielding questions about smtp authentication or outgoing mail being blocked by Norton (after an update) has been wonderful. The company I deal with doesn't charge any extra and is willing to walk my clients through their setups over the phone.

I agree that general info should come from us and we should be a resource. But many customers seem unable or unwilling to read instructions--they want to be able to call tech support and get the instructions immediately. My host takes care of that.

They don't have an actual link for the support service--I happened to call one day to ask about an obscure problem a client was having and they volunteered to take care of it for me: no extra charge. They've done it ever since.

I may mention to them that they should market this aggressively--it might be a new path for a company that has really skiiled TS guys when it comes to workstation support.

This is a generational thing. Most of the folks in business now are people who didn't grow up with the net, and many don't even know much about their own PCs. Once the kids of the 80s and on get into higher company positions all this techno-ignorance will be greatly reduced.

Originally Posted by April

This is a generational thing. Most of the folks in business now are people who didn't grow up with the net. Once the kids of the 80s and on get into higher company positions all this techno-ignorance will be greatly reduced.

Maybe.

But a lot of people who will be in business in future generations won't be all that savvy on running their own website. Just because they can download music and videos and spend hours in chat rooms doesn't mean they will know anything about setting up a website, as distinct from some personal page offered by an ISP etc, or be interested in running it.

Countless people who know how to do things will often pay someone else to do it, no matter how idiot simple the task: car washing; window washing; lawn mowing; house cleaning; etc etc - they're all services that few people paid for in the early 80's but an awful lot of people happily pay for now.

A host which can deliver a fully functioning website running the client's email etc without any setup by the client should be at least as attractive to a lot of businesses as home-delivered pizzas are to countless people, all of whom are perfectly capable of driving to a shop a few minutes away to pick up a pizza at lower cost.