The latest issue of WHIR magazine is most likely in the mail by this point, and ought to be arriving at the mailboxes of subscribers soon.
With this issue, we address a matter that I believe should resonate more within the hosting business than it does, despite the amount of discussion it receives.
There’s no doubt that we, and everyone else, regularly refer to the notion of adding services around the basic functions of Web hosting as a way for hosting providers to add revenue while making their overall offerings more attractive.
At this point, however, that process has become key to succeeding in the Web hosting business. Value-added services, as they were once most commonly called, have evolved from a Web hosting strategy into a central tenet of the successful hosting business model.
Web hosts and the vendors that supply them tend to agree that only a select few can successfully compete on price, in either the shared or dedicated hosting space.
The answer, for hosting providers that aren’t in a position to compete on price with the Googles and Go Daddys of the world is to build value into their offerings. Moving up the value chain has two distinct benefits for Web hosting providers – it increases the revenue generated by every customer, server or square foot of data center space, and it increases the value of the host’s offering to its customers. It makes them want (and to a certain extent need) to stick with that provider.
Our July issue includes a feature from Dennis McCafferty, who discusses how dedicated hosting providers can combat the commoditization of their business by moving into managed services, offering customers things like monitoring and management.
And on the shared side of the business, Esther M. Bauer delivers a feature examining the modern shared hosting business model, in which hosts up-sell add-on services surrounding the basic discounted Web hosting product.
Most of the ongoing influences on the Web hosting market have pressed its evolution in this direction. Adding value and assembling services around the basic offering to maximize the value of each customer relationship is now an important part of building a Web hosting business.
I hope that the upcoming issue of WHIR magazine will help you to develop a system for maximizing each of your customer relationships.
