Between Jan 2 and Feb 7, TheWHIR published 23 announcements of shared hosting price reductions. For instance…
* HostMySite, Hostway, Sibername, MyDomain, 4Domains and Web World Ireland are among those who cut domain prices.
* AIT, HostICan , LunarPages , NetPivotal, CWCS, and Netazen increased bandwidth and/or storage allocations.
* Webair, Hosted and 1&1 ran half-price promotions.
Many of these announcement mention a desire to make it more affordable for small businesses to maintain a web
presence. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never come across a company that held off on building a website because it can’t come up with $5 or $10 a month.
And of course, all of these promotions are intended to enhance competitiveness. But as CrystalTech’s Robert Cichon puts it, “survival will be brutal, marketing impossible and customer acquisition badly flawed” if one’s only sales propositions are price and resource allocations.
I think the average small business owner is probably shorter on time than web hosting budget, which is why I feel like BT might be onto something with BT Tradespace. (As David Terrar reports, this is BT’s third small business initiative, following their SaaS marketplace and online collaboration service. BT also offers traditional website/ecommerce hosting.)
Here is an example of a BT Tradespace. The site owner can provide a company description, upload photos and post news updates via a web-based interface; no FTP client or HTML knowledge required. Visitors can rate the company, map its location, request an appointment, or contact it via email or VoIP. As David points out, it delivers a lot of usefulness for very little effort.
No, BT Tradespace’s functionality won’t be enough for everyone. Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces has a relatively limited feature set as well, but it signed up 650,000 new users in January alone! The trick to bringing new users into the market, I think, is to lower the entry barrier – not in terms of monthly fee, but time investment required.
PS – BT Tradespace and BT’s “Workspace” collaboration service are both powered by SMBLive. Telus is another SMBLive partner.
