OnApp's Ditlev Bredahl delivering presentation at cPanel Bootcamp
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The keynote session Wednesday morning at cPanel Bootcamp was delivered by Ditlev Bredahl of OnApp, who looked largely at the conditions in the mainstream shared hosting market, which he says is a difficult market in which to compete.
The feature war is over, he says, and everyone lost, in the sense that hosts in the mainstream shared market have to offer unlimited capacity for a tiny price. The only factors affecting your performance in that market, he says, are price and marketing budget, and changing either affect your bottom line in about the same way, by cutting into it.
Basically, hosting in the mass market is too difficult, he says. You’re competing with huge companies, with huge marketing budgets. He says there’s more of an opportunity in targeting the “geek” market, because of the conditions affecting that market.
Among geeks, product is king. They know what they want, rather than “unlimited.” If you build a remarkable product, he says, geeks will be interested and find you. They’re great at giving you feedback and helping you to improve your products.
Along with helping you build your product, geeks will help you sell it. They’re passionate about what they buy, and will talk to friends about it.
Getting the right product to the right geeks, he says, gets you half the way there.
If you focus on the right clients, and build the right product, you can avoid all the pricing and marketing fighting that characterizes the mass market.
The real way to stand out is to find something you can do excellently and focus on that. At UK2, where Bredahl was CEO, there were a couple examples of how they built really successful businesses by just adding 5 percent to an existing service – 100TB.com and VPS.net.
He said the strategy at UK2 was that 20 percent of revenue must come from products the company did not have the prior year, basically forcing the company to innovate ahead of the big players.
There is an opportunity, he says, in finding markets that are broken, and disrupting them.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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