By Liam Eagle, theWHIR.com
June 5, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In what appears to be a rather quick response to a recent outcry regarding hosting prices, dedicated hosting provider SingleHop (singlehop.com) said Thursday that it is offering a lifetime price lock for customers that switch to its services during the month of June.
SingleHop doesn’t name names, saying instead that the deal is a “response to the controversy surrounding recent price hikes by several managed hosting providers,” but the offer at least appears to be a reaction to last week’s announcement by Layered Technologies that it would be hiking prices for many of its older dedicated server clients, beginning in July.
The company cited rising energy costs as being among the main reason for the increase in price, particularly since the older hardware tends to consume more power than more energy-efficient new hardware.
That announcement spawned a lengthy message thread on WebhostingTalk, in which many current Layered Tech clients, some of them resellers, said they couldn’t afford to stay following the increase and were actively seeking new hosting solutions.
Hosts have been known to offer “migration specials” for customers of hosts suffering service outages or similar problems before. SingleHop appears to be the only hosting provider offering a migration offering linked to the situation among Layered Tech customers, though the WHT thread does include several mentions of customers receiving private messages from other hosting providers after having posted price-related complaints.
The SingleHop offer includes a permanent “price-lock guarantee” for any customer who switches from a competitor during June 2008, as well as a “$200 cash back rebate,” a 100 percent network uptime guarantee, a one-hour hardware replacement guarantee and an “iron clad” service level agreement.
“Given rising energy costs and the proliferation of inefficient server hardware that is commonly used in the industry, it’s not much of a surprise that prices have gone up and that some providers have passed the price increases along to their clients,” says Dan Ushman, co-founder of SingleHop, in the press release announcing the deal. “Our price-lock is a hedge against future rising energy costs, which we can afford to do because of the investments that we’ve made in power-efficient servers. We don’t want our customers to pay for inefficiency in the data center.”
While a migration deal like this one can be interpreted as an implied criticism of a perceived flaw in another provider’s service, the other obvious implication of this offer is the fact that pricing for SingleHop customers other than those who migrate to the company this month from another service provider could be subject to price increases in the future, too.
“The bottom line is that no matter how efficient we make our servers, energy costs will continue to rise, but we have a window on this efficiency now,” says Ushman, elsewhere in the announcement. “We don’t think we’ll be able to do this again any time soon. Energy costs are impossible to predict, so it would be irresponsible for any provider, including SingleHop, to blindly offer an indefinite price-lock.”
SingleHop has offered other special promotions in the past, including a deal in February, through which it offered the opportunity to try its managed dedicated services for a month for $1.
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