There’s more than one kind of customer who goes for the cheapest-they-can-find hosting package. On the one hand, there’s that “Webhosting Talk crowd” (a generalization, of course, and not a knock against WHT), a group who demand the best, want to pay the least and well be back online tearing you apart and looking for a new host at the drop of a packet.
And on the other hand there’s, well, just about everyone else.
It’s human nature, I’d say, to seek out the best deal. Look at the whole “black Friday/cyber Monday” scenario we just went through.
My point, anyway, is that a huge percentage of web hosting customers (even more if you include the whole blogger/facebook/youtube functional hosting thing) know next to nothing about what they’re buying, and want to pay next to nothing for it.
And certainly, that’s their right. The tragedy for those customers is that there is a kind of host that is, to use a kind of broadly applicable generalization, “bad.” And the customers – whose attraction to a good deal, let’s remember, does not make them bad – often lack the means to spot a bad host, which can ultimately lead to headaches, downtime or worse.
Now, chances are, you don’t operate GoDaddy or 1&1 Internet or one of the maybe a dozen other companies with the scale to actually make a go of the “web hosting for $5″ business model. Chances are you don’t deal with tiny, ultra-price-conscious hosting accounts. So this doesn’t affect you, exactly.
But here’s a story.
It’s from the Nieman Journalism Lab, which is (to quote the website) “a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.”
It sounds cute to me, because I’m an Internet journalist. And to you, probably, because you’re a web host (probably).
The story goes like this: newspaper journalist Jim Gannon started the online publication The Rappahannock Voice to cover his Virginia neighborhood in his retirement. He’s a good journalist but a self-described “techno-dummy” who publishes a web site without knowing too much about what exactly is going on behind the scenes.
Then one day, it’s not there anymore. Obviously, a few mistakes were made. By the sounds of it, Gannon doesn’t know who hosts his site, or where the company is located.
“He’s working to track down where he hopes his web site’s database might still live, on some server in a city he doesn’t know, belonging to some company he doesn’t know. His hunt may work out (I certainly hope it does); it may not. But hopefully it can spur some journalists-turned-entrepreneurs to do the checks that can help prevent Gannon’s fate from befalling them.”
“Gannon told me he doesn’t yet know the details of his hosting arrangement; he let a more tech-savvy area resident handle those details. But he said he did use a reseller to host RappVoice.com, and that he thinks it’s the reseller that suddenly disappeared off the Internet.”
Here’s where the author of the article starts offering advice to online journalists on how they might do some checks that will help them avoid Gannon’s fate. In particular, he points out some of the questions that exist around working with resellers.
And here’s where it gets particularly interesting. Because, while you could unquestionably argue there are many reputable resellers out there – reputable resellers probably make up the majority of the businesses in the web hosting industry – you’d also have to acknowledge that there is no shortage of disreputable, fly-by-night hosting resellers (the article’s author Joshua Benton, for his part, concedes that there are good resellers).
Here, he talks to Glen Fleishman, creator of the site ItDied.com, which chronicles the disappearance of various hosted services. He says:
“One of the things that I think is probably most disturbing here is that there is no good way, except for a financial reporter who wants to dig, to determine anything like the actual fiscal health of any hosting company, even those publicly traded. Many of these companies offer crazy loss-leader services that are designed to attract recurring revenue and upsold services. As the upsell disappears or customers fail to renew, they’re going to go cash-flow negative very quickly.”
It’s a simple outlook, but not entirely untrue. And it raises an interesting issue.
Let’s say you’re a reseller. Your prospective customers, if they’re smart, won’t take it on faith that you run a reliable business and will deliver on your promises and protect their data should problems arise for you. And you want smart customers. Those are the ones that grow and become bigger, more profitable customers.
The problem is, they can’t necessarily distinguish between a reputable host and a disreputable one based on whatever information they’re able to glean from your site. For the bad hosts, a web site is the best vehicle for distributing misleading information (like, say, data center photos taken from the site of another company that actually has a data center). Even if you wanted to show them some kind of a balance sheet that demonstrated your financial viability, it would have to be though some sort of verifiable third party.
It’s interesting that the advice in the article aims to help customers protect themselves from potentially dishonest hosts. It seems to me that the trust issue calls on hosts to make an effort to earn the trust of prospective customers.
So here’s the question: how does a stable, reputable host give customers the impression that it is a stable, reputable host?
Here are a few ideas:
- Build a reputation. Obviously, that’s not a short-term solution. Reputations are built over time. But your reputation should absolutely be one of your business objectives. A customer earned through a referral is a customer you don’t need to convince to trust you – though you need to live up to the reputation that brought them. The Neiman Lab article, incidentally, includes a bit of an endorsement of Pair.com, so you can see reputation at work there.
- Seek some sort of third-party validation of your service, possibly using a service like RatePoint or even the Better Business Bureau.
- Be transparent. These days, lots of hosts operate blogs and produce other website content designed to create a personality their customers can access. In the example of Jim Gannon’s disappearing Rappahannock Voice, at least he’d know who he had to track down to find his data.
- Foster a personal relationship with customers. After all, that’s the whole reason for dealing with a hosting provider that is a reseller in the first place – the personal touch. A customer looking for an anonymous transaction with a host that will never go away is better off with GoDaddy anyway (and technically, GoDaddy even does the personal touch thing). But your hosting customers should feel like they can get in touch with you if they need to, right?
Anyway, there are a few ideas. And I’m way past the word count I was shooting for.
If you have any more, please head for the comments section. I’d love to hear them. And so, I’m sure, would everyone else.
