Back in May 2003, I put up the first version of the Internet Guru Hosting web site. It was part of my grand plan of global domination through cheap no-frills web hosting. It was fairly basic, a shopping cart for sales and a support forum to help smooth out some of our support wrinkles.
Well after 10 year we still hadn’t achieved global domination. So after sitting steadily on about 20o hosting customers for the last ten years, I decided it is time to reboot. But the web hosting business is a very different industry to what it was 10 years ago. What was once a specialised service has now become a commodity product with $1, free and “unlimited” hosting packages in abundance. Not to mention that many business are using hosting it as loss leader as a way of enticing customers to their high end offerings.
As we well know, a large number of websites will never receive substantial traffic. There is money to be made in “up selling” services to web owners. Something that is very apparent when you attempt to buy budget domain names or web hosting. It is not uncommon to have to wade through pages of offers before you can make your final purchase. Most business owners have an hourly worth to their business of $200-$300 minimum. So you can easily waste $100’s of your time to save your business $50 on a domain name purchase.
Introducing our new web hosting service
So where does that place our our web hosting offerings? Well I don’t want to compete on price. I’m not interested in being in the premium end of town either. So when it came to the crunch I researched our main competitors and matched their packages and pricing. Then I setup a re-badged, rebooted version of the old hosting business called Web Necessities™.
Web Necessities offers a mix of Web Hosting products, domain registration services and Website packages. These are aimed specifically at small to medium size business. As is often the case, the only time most businesses have contact with their web hosting provider is when there is a problem with the hosting or the annual renewal is due. I’m hoping to turn that around a bit by trying to engage more with our hosting customers. It is still early days with that and we’ll see how that goes. However it is my intention to be able to add value way beyond the annual hosting fees.