News: Web Host ViaWest Names VP and GM of Sales for Utah
News: BlueLock Introduces New Suite of Cloud Computing Services
News: ShareFile Opens its First EU Data Center in Ireland
News: AtlantaNAP Completes SAS 70 Type II Audit
News: Answers.com Signs Colo Deal with C7 Data Centers
Register.com Refocuses on SMB MarketBy Justin Lee, theWHIR.com
October 31, 2007 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- As the domain industry becomes saturated with offerings, the level of competition is rising accordingly. Even the veterans are finding it difficult to differentiate their services from competing domain registrars.
Recognizing this, domain register Register.com (register.com) has undergone a significant transformation within the past year, starting with the restructuring of its core management team.
Last November, the company named Larry Kutscher, a former senior VP and GM of the small business group for Dun & Bradstreet, its new CEO. Soon after, Mike Devine joined as CFO.
With the addition of Douglas Shuman as senior VP of customer marketing, the newly formed management team began to research its customer base. Finding that this group was comprised in large part of small businesses, Register.com decided to refocus its target market. Using the combined expertise of both a branding and a PR firm, Register.com sought to communicate its new focus to the SMB community.
"This is a whole new Register.com," says Shuman. "First and foremost, we are focusing on core strategy. As a company, we are locked down on the small business segment. We realize there is a huge underserved marketplace out there."
In refocusing its attention on small businesses, Register.com is expanding its domain name search capabilities. By partnering with domain marketplace sites NameMedia and Fabulous.com, the company is giving customers access to over 1.5 million premium domains - both new domains and domains that are currently registered but are available for resale.
This expansion enables small businesses to access both new domains and names that are currently registered but are available for resale.
"We've tapped into several providers to create a secondary market," says Shuman. "We'll tell you if the domain name is registered, or if it's available through one of our secondary market providers. It is our goal not just to provide reasonably priced domain names, but to provide the best domain names in the marketplace."
The company is currently in the process of re-launching all of its products to customize them for the needs of the small business customer. In July Register.com re-launched the "Do It Myself" Web hosting plan which enables small business users to customize their sites. The plan was successful, sparking growth of more than 10 percent in subscriptions since its launch.
The "Build My Website Custom" site design service has also proved popular. Register.com says it expects to publish close to 1,000 sites in its first year with this product.
Having doubled its percentage growth year-to-date from last year, Register.com is steadily strengthening its position as a leader in the small business market, says Shuman.
"We really want to be the IT department for small businesses as far as their Web services are concerned, so we're designing our entire strategy around that need," says Shuman. "And it's a huge market. In a nutshell, our strategy is to be the most trusted provider of Web services for small businesses.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
Comment anonymously or log into your WHIR account
Logging in allows enhanced commenting features (such as external linking) in news, features, blogs and more.
Comment by Anonymous on Friday, November 02, 2007
how much did register.com pay for this shill of an article? Is this article serious?
Have you ever tried their small business "tools"? They are over-priced, sub-par, half-baked products that offer no real value to a small business.
This company is 100% marketing hype and losing steam fast!
Comment by Anonymous on Friday, November 02, 2007
Obviously you're not a fan of Register.com. But that's not a reason for us to ignore the company. The article lists the company's plans for refocusing its business, and which new products are seeing traction. It doesn't reccommend any products.
More importantly, it has always been on the record that editorial content on this site is not for sale. We have plenty of up-front avenues for advertising.
Comment by Anonymous on Thursday, May 29, 2008
They price their domains higher than the registrar whose system they use to offer domains to resellers. They are using the ENOM program to sell domain names to resellers and I assume they are purchasing them there as well to resell to end consumers. If you go to ENOM you can pay $29.95 but if you go to register.com you pay $35.00. Why is that? Do a WHOIS lookup on rcomexpress.com and you will see that the IP address links to ENOM. All of their services are higher than ENOM. How can they get customers this way?