Speaking of Tucows (I was speaking of Tucows and its OpenSRS rebranding in an earlier post, which you have almost certainly read already, but which you can reach by clicking here), I sat in on a presentation by Adam Eisner, the domains product manager at Tucows, this afternoon.
Full disclosure - I like the guy, so I had a bit of a rooting interest going into this session, but it was pretty commendable in a couple of ways.
First and foremost, it was only just barely an ad for Tucows, which is always nice to see in this kind of venue, where presenters far too often veer into sort of shameless self promotion.
As much as I appreciated the delivery, the content of the session was nothing really cutting edge. That's not a criticism of the content, really. To his credit, Adam's angle in presenting it was basically "I'm surprised more hosts don't get this."
Anyway, to paraphrase the presenter, I suppose, I'm surprised more hosts don't get this.
His advice for building a buyer friendly hosting business was mostly tips for designing your website, messaging and strategy to produce an offering that speaks to the kinds of problems that the people that buy hosting are trying to address.
For example, a chart listing features and pricing doesn't really speak to a small business owner that wants to bring their business online.
He also expressed surprise that hosting providers don't put the tools for domain registration (and discovery) front and center. As kind of the platform on which just about every hosted service sits, it doesn't make sense for the domain name function at a web host to sit anywhere other than first on the agenda.
And not having a full suite of services like SSL certificates and email hosting (all of them available from private-label partners like, say, Tucows) just makes it necessary that each of your customers that needs one of those services has to go buy them from another provider that is probably going to try to up-sell them on the other services they provide, which may cost you a hosting customer.
No earth shattering revelation in any of those - just a lot of common sense. But it's surprising the number of hosts that appear to need to sit through that kind of advice.
On top of all that, he made a couple of points that resonated in particular.
First, that hosts in general seem to be inclined to sell to a selection of customers he summed up by saying "webhostingtalk.com." Those are the customers (and the general audience for the popular hosting message board) that buy based on capacity and pricing and almost nothing else, and would probably be attracted to the kinds of numbers-and-features marketing that fails to address the real customer problems. Those capacity-focused customers, should you succeed in attracting them, are almost certainly going to leave your company as soon as someone else offers them a better deal on bandwidth.
Secondly, it's surprising how many hosts' domain name search function punish customers for not using the proper url syntax in typing in their search, and completely ignore the possibility of steering those searchers in the direction of aftermarket domains, or a functioning domain suggestion tool.
That last point, I'm certain he made in a presentation at last year's HostingCon. But I'm surprised that with all I hear about the growth of the domain aftermarket, there are a lot of hosts who haven't got around to building those functions into their offerings.
That's sometimes the thing that strikes me most significantly about HostingCon each year. Not the amount of repetition that seems to be going on, but how necessary that repetition seems in a lot of cases.
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