How can a small service provider compete against Google, Amazon, and the other giants entering the cloud/hosting market? The cloud is now a reality. However, your company can start your own affordable cloud offering and even compete against the big boys and win. It may seem like a no win situation to try and compete against the big boys. However, smaller providers can compete and win provided they do the things the big guys are not willing or capable of doing. Larger companies are slow to evolve, are generally worse at customer service, unwilling to help the customer resolve technical issues beyond the core basics, and have strict guidelines for what customers can and can not do.

KEYS TO COMPETING AGAINST LARGE COMPANIES

1. Improve your customers experience. Personalize.

A good example to showcase is Wal Mart. While Wal Mart tries to be everything to everyone, they are missing a few key components that are important to the customer experience. While Wal Mart does offer an exceptional product offering and good pricing, their customer service is horrible. Employees barely say hi to you in the check out lane. You can also expect to stand in a Soviet-Era bread line while you wait to pay for your savings on the products. Contrast to Target which charges a bit more, offers higher quality products, and you can expect to wait less in the check out lane. Both are still large companies and offer a breadth of products and offer a relatively dull customer experience.

SOLUTION(S): Let your customer get to know you better. Start a company blog that contains more than simple marketing messages. Let the customer know you are a hard working company full of energetic people willing to go the extra mile. Add additional bundled support options the larger companies simply can not compete with. Spend additional time early in the process to ensure your new customers are setup properly. Perhaps give them an email asking them if everything is fine and if they need anything. Generally in web hosting, if you can get the customer setup properly and familiar with your systems within 72 hours you will rarely hear from that customer. Yes, I know… you’re afraid of getting a lot of high maintenance customers. Fear not, your good customers will far exceed the high maintenance customers.

Showcase your companies personality and willingness to help the customer get up and running. Perhaps your site could use a re-design bringing these aspects in. Focus more on service and customer experience than pricing. Don’t copy the big providers boring and bland white paper looking web sites. Add twitter to your home page, maybe a link to a company FaceBook profile.

2. Offer niche products. Specialized plans. Read the rest of this entry »

Writing Often Keeps Your Blog Fresh

Businesses have many options to communicate with their customers these days, and hosting can play an important role. There is direct mail, email newsletters, and even Twitter. One of the most effective methods to communicate with both current and future customers is a blog for your business.
With a blog you can announce new products and services, update customers on company news, and create a stronger personality for your business brand. Even if you have very little experience with technology and the Internet, you can create a business blog in just 4 easy steps.

Step 1 – Planning Your Blog – Before you get started, you’ll need to think about what you would include in your blog. Here are a few ideas for you. If you have physical locations for your business – then you may want to include directions and maps as part of your site. If you are frequently updating your products and services, can have a section for that. Do you have visually interesting products, or want to feature photos of your employees? Create a photo gallery section. The options are only limited by your imagination. Don’t worry if you don’t have a complete idea of your site before you start, you can always create new site features once your blog has launched.

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Are you the type of user looking to launch a comprehensive website, but lack the technical jargon or knowledge as to how to go about it yourself?  If you fall into this category, your are in luck.  Today we take a closer look at the QuickSite Hosting Service to see how Lunarpages.com created the simplest of solutions to make this happen.  The QuickSite service provides you with 3 easy steps to launch a website…..no technical knowledge required, you don’t even have to hire a designer/programmer.

To get started visit Lunarpages QuickSite, enter your e-mail and phone number and you’ll be on your way to launching your website.

One of the first steps in the process is to select a template for your website.  There are more than 400 templates to choose from and you can also personalize the templates by changing the color themes. There are literary no limitations as far as designing your website is concerned. You can juggle with all the options to ensure your website is exactly how you would like it laid out.  You are also provided with additional options to edit content within the site, this proves to be critical element prior to the design phase and even once the website is live (and you want to update your content). Read the rest of this entry »

In today’s economy running your own internal data center is an expensive undertaking. Hosting web servers, application servers, and collaboration servers within your own office building is a reality for most small businesses. IT managers prefer close proximity to equipment so they can manage any hardware failures or software issues quickly. If your company does not have an IT manager, you most likely have an outsourced IT department. A “Nerd Herd” type solution who you call when things go wrong or you need something configured or set up.

I often wonder at the amount of money that goes into this old school way of handling small business infrastructure. Power, human resources, payroll taxes, equipment, generators, routers, switches, software licensing costs, and the list goes on and on.

HOSTING INTERNALLY IS A WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY
Many companies fail to realize the implications of hosting their equipment internally. Power costs continue to rise, brown outs are increasingly common, and  power grid is sure to be stretched as people ween themselves off of fossil fuels. If your systems are mission critical then you also need to have backup batteries and diesel generators at the ready.

Hosting your own equipment also brings other unnecessary costs to the table in regards to networking equipment. Routers, switches, and experts who configure this equipment are all added expenses. Factor in hardware firewalls, DDOS protection, high availability and your costs have soared.

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Dedicated server shopping can be overwhelming, since there are lots of things to consider- platform, plan features, and pricing, just to name a few.  There are also less obvious considerations that can have a major impact on how successful your choice will be, and one of the biggest is also one of the easiest to answer i.e. is the company privately held or publically traded?

Looking beyond buying shares in a hosting company, (although a successful dedicated server host might look good in your portfolio), it should be a factor in your decision making process. Knowing that a company is public means that a lot of your due diligence has already been done, and done well.  Public companies are audited from top to bottom.  Not only must the company be financially sound, but everything from personnel to equipment to the overall business plan must undergo a complete evaluation.  Public companies have business practices that are fully documented, which might not seem like a big thing, but anyone who has worked in an environment where people make things up as they go along can attest to the benefit of quality documentation.

Public scrutiny is a good thing – that many secretive hosting providers do not understand.  Where a privately held company may be accountable to the customers and the business owner, a publically held dedicated server hosting company has another level of accountability to deal with- shareholders and a board of directors.  As a customer, your visibility is into what goes on at your managed dedicated hosting provider ends at the website and customer support number.  Shareholders and the board of directors on the other hand have much greater visibility into the operations of the company, questionable decisions, performance issues, and anything else that impacts the bottom line is subject to scrutiny by the stockholders. Read the rest of this entry »