By Justin Lee, theWHIR.com
February 15, 2006 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — These days, finding a moderately priced, but sufficiently featured Web hosting service for small to medium-sized businesses seems like a losing battle. On one hand, free and low-cost hosting providers lack the storage space or features most customers need, and on the other hand, many higher-end, feature-rich Web hosting services are priced out of the range of most SMBs.
Meeting the market between these extremes was the goal of XO Communications (xo.com) as it introduced a number of significant upgrades to the offerings of its Concentric (concentric.com) hosting brand.
The company hopes to create greater value by increasing bandwidth, disk space and the number of email addresses included with its hosting plans.
“We’re increasing the allocations, which is a bit of a marketing game,” says Barbara Branaman, VP and GM of XO’s hosting business unit. “It’s not that most customers really use all of those things. It’s really more of a comparison-shopping thing. We think it’s the right move to make at this time.”
Concentric’s email, starter, basic, professional and enterprise plans have all bee upgraded, and now offer more than double the disk space, up to 160 percent more bandwidth and the ability to support more than double the number of email addresses.
However, Concentric recognized that these allocations alone were not enough to satisfy its clientele – the majority of which are small businesses that have one to 25 employees – so it developed a range of new value-added services.
“The trend you’re seeing now is a package of services,” says Branaman. “The trick is not necessarily getting as many sales of just the commoditized hosting plans as possible, but getting as many customers that are buying multiple services. That’s the real key to growing.”
Among the most important new features is XO’s private domain registration for customers who register their domain name through Concentric.
The new security feature, priced at $8.95 a year, makes it difficult for spammers to access a registrant’s contact email address, and prevents any private information from leaking out to the public.
Other new services include file management system Netdrive, which enables multiple users to share files, collaborate, and manage version control.
Secondary MX provides businesses with their own mail server so that they can use Concentric email as a secondary location to collect and store mail in the event of a server crash.
DNS management tools allow customers to manage records for their account’s primary domain name and any aliases.
Finally, Concentric offers customers the ability to add resources at whim through its online instant provisioning tools. By increasing the bandwidth, storage space and transfer speed of its
Web site, businesses can handle any sudden peaks in traffic and ensure high performance at all times.
By offering these value-added hosting features and providing quality customer service, Branaman hopes Concentric will continue to maintain its competitive edge.
“It’s no longer enough to be the best host anymore,” says Branaman. “That was enough back in ’99; if you had excellent service people would stay with you. But customers are getting more sophisticated and their buying patterns are different. What we’re doing is trying to get ahead of the curve and really figure out what people are buying, as opposed to just following the crowd.”
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