July 24, 2006 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Whether by default, by necessity or by design, certain standards of doing business have developed in the hosting industry. And they haven't always met precisely with what would be best for the hosting customer. In the case of disk space or bandwidth, customers often end up buying more than they need, or paying more than they have to for extra service.
In their efforts to make their services more attractive, Web hosts are taking a more active approach to giving customers what they pay for. With its new Rollover Bandwidth offering, Web hosting provider Host Depot (hostdepot.com) is departing from the standard bandwidth-buying process presented to customers, enabling them to use the resources they buy more efficiently and more completely.
Like most Web hosts, Host Depot delivers customers' bandwidth in monthly allotments attached to its range of Web hosting packages – the company's $7.46-per-month Starter plan includes 100GB of monthly data transfer, while its $37.46-per-month Enterprise plan includes 500GB.
Unlike most Web hosts, however, Host Depot is working to ensure that its customers have every opportunity to use the bandwidth they purchase, and avoid paying overage charges for the times they encounter more-than-ordinary levels of traffic.
"When we actually did the research and looked at our customer base, we saw that 47 percent of our SMB customers were having overage charges," says Mark Erskine, CEO of Host Depot. "A lot of customers are throwing away that money."
Erskine says an apt comparison for the Rollover Bandwidth program is the "rollover minutes" program offered by wireless carrier Cingular – it allows the company's mobile phone subscribers to carry the unused minutes from their plans over from month to month.
Host Depot's Rollover Bandwidth works on a rolling 12-month window, says Erskine. When a customer has transfer capacity left over in a given month, it is automatically applied to their banked total. If a customer exceeds their allotted bandwidth for a month, their banked capacity is automatically applied to the excess, saving them from having to pay excess overage charges.
The rollover bandwidth plan is an unusual new hosting offering in that it contains no inherent new profits for the service provider. As Erskine describes it, "it only benefits the customer."
In fact, Host Depot is effectively eliminating overage charges, a source of additional revenue for more Web hosts – the offering will cost Host Depot money on a customer-by-customer basis. The company is counting on the fact that striving to give customers more of what they pay for will make Host Depot more attractive to new customers.
"This is going to be one of our differentiators," says Erskine.
