Blogs: M&M’s --- Part I - This stands for Marketing and Money
Blogs: Sometimes not making money is ok....
News: SaaS Software Licensing with Insight
News: Managed Email Security Services Trends with eleven and Variomedia
Ensim Ignite Completes the Web Hosting Package
By Liam Eagle, theWHIR.com
April 12, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY
REVIEW) -- Most Web hosts and analysts are, by now, in agreement about
the tremendous potential held by the small to medium-sized enterprise
(SME) market as a base of Web hosting customers.
Along with the attention, of course, has
come an increasingly sophisticated set of hosting and hosting-related
solutions for SME customers, as many of the largest companies in the
Web hosting business – Interland, Verio and others – have turned heir
attention, and their considerable resources, squarely toward the SME
market.
Many large Web hosts, through acquisition
and internal development, have built out their basic Web hosting
solutions with additional services like Web site building tools and
Internet marketing solutions, providing customers with access to more
complete support for their Internet presences. With much more limited
resources, smaller hosting providers are finding it difficult to offer
a comparable solution.
With the launch of its Ensim Ignite offering on Monday, Web hosting automation software firm Ensim Corporation (ensim.com)
says it has enabled smaller hosting providers to move beyond just Web
hosting and offer customers a complete solution comparable to those
previously offered by only the largest hosts.
According to Steve Dauber, vice president
of marketing at Ensim, most small businesses think of their Web
presence as just a part of a larger marketing strategy, and often have
not considered the amount of work involved in marketing the Web site
alone.
"What small business are looking for is a
whole solution of which a Web site is a piece," says Dauber. "They're
not technologists. They're looking for their hosting company to guide
them in using the Internet as a tool."
Through a series of partnerships, says
Dauber, Ensim Ignite allows hosting provider to offer their customers
email marketing, search engine submission, merchant services and SSL
certificates.
For search engine marketing service, Ensim partnered with SubmitNet (submitnet.net),
a firm specializing in technology-driven search engine optimization
tools. Through Ensim Ignite, hosting providers will be able to offer
their customers SubmitNet's tools for analyzing, testing, monitoring
and reporting on the quality of their online presences.
To enable hosts to offer customers an email marketing solution, Ensim partnered with Roving Software (constantcontact.com),
developer of the Constant Contact do-it-yourself email marketing
service. Through Ensim Ignite, hosts will be able to provide customers
with the tools for creating effective, affordable email campaigns.
For merchant services, Ensim partnered with PaySystems (paysystems.com),
a provider of online payment systems and merchant services, allowing
hosting providers to offer customers simple tools for processing credit
cards and checks over the Internet.
Ensim also partnered with secure computing firm VeriSign (verisign.com)
to enable hosting providers to offer customers SSL certificates, which
will allow them to establish secure connections with customers,
ensuring that online transactions are safe.
Through Ensim Ignite, says the company,
hosting providers can generate increased revenue and profit with almost
no up-front investment. The service is free to install, and simple to
implement, says Ensim. Customers purchase the services directly from
the participating vendors, so hosting providers are not required to
deal with the customer support or billing expenses involved. For every
service sold, Ensim sends out payment to the hosting provider.
Making implementation simple for hosting
providers was a matter of key focus for Ensim Ignite, says Dauber. And
to that end, the company has created a set of marketing materials to be
made available to Ignite users. The materials include things like email
templates and Web site graphics that are free for hosting providers to
use in selling the ignite services to their customers.
"What we've done as part of this
solution, in addition to pulling all the vendors together and arranging
for the hosts to be paid, is we've created a set of
professionally-developed marketing materials," says Dauber. We've even
arranged for hosts to get a free email marketing account through which
they can manage their marketing of this solution to their customers."
Participation in Ensim Ignite is not
limited to customers of the Ensim Pro control panel software. The
program is available to all hosting providers, including those using
competing control panels.
Dauber says Ensim Ignite could level the
playing field for small hosts serving the SME space. Much the way Ensim
Pro opened up the Web hosting market to companies of every size, says
Dauber, Ensim Ignite could allow smaller hosts to provide the complete
solution previously available only to the large hosting providers.
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
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