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.

Read the rest of this entry »

When Watts Humphrey designed the framework underlying the Capability Maturity Model, his purpose was for the CMM to have positive aspects in organizations. His intent was that the CMM should help organizations improve the ability of their workforce and develop, motivate, organize and retain talent. Even though the Capability Maturity Model has constructive parts in organizations, it also has destructive parts when it is applied to organizations.

In this article by Kerime Ataker, Superb Internet Corporation Product Marketing Specialist will focus on the negative and positive aspects of the Capability Maturity Model.  Kerime intends to provide both sides of the CMM and the reasons why this model may or may not function well in a particular organization.

Negative and Positive Aspects of the Capability Maturity Model in Organizations

How disappointing it is to read that, according to research, seven out of eight information technology projects fail to meet the original time, cost, and requirements criteria (McManus & Wood-Harper, 2008). According to McManus and Wood-Harper, the key finding from studies of successful and unsuccessful projects is that no single factor is the overriding cause of project failure; however, instead, a number of factors contribute to failure, and some of them interact with each other. The most important reasons why projects fail are poor communication, lack of user or customer involvement, ineffective project managers, insufficiently managed requirements, undisciplined project definitions or baselines, and uncontrolled scope (McManus & Wood-Harper, 2008). A project that has senior-level sponsorship has a higher chance to be supportive of the strategy and goals of the business. Also, it has a higher chance to have an experienced and disciplined control team that will be actively involved in confirming the project’s objectives against those goals. Of course, this kind of involvement requires good communication within the project team as well as good management requirements. Thus, the Capability Maturity Model was established to avoid all of these failure factors and help projects succeed. Even though the Capability Maturity Model is designed to help organizations not overrun schedule and budget constraints to complete a project, the model has negative and positive aspects when applied to organizations.

The Capability Maturity Model has a well organized structure for managing the software process. When Watts Humphrey designed the CMM, he made sure that the model consisted of five levels. Kashif Manzoor, software engineer, on his website, has explained these five levels of the CMM. Initial is the first level. At this level, processes are disorganized and chaotic. Also, success is expected to depend on individual efforts and is not considered to be repeatable since processes would not be sufficiently clear and documented to allow them to be replicated. Repeatable is the second level, and at this level, basic project management techniques are established. Also, success could be repeated since the essential processes would have been established, defined, and documented. Read the rest of this entry »

I would like to introduce myself. This is my first official Blog that I’ve spent more than 30 seconds on (going further than TEST TEST 123 which is my normal Blog).

My name is Chris Henning and I am the founder of FindMyHost.com and HostDiscussion.com. I’ve been in the hosting business a very long time (since 1998). After my failed attempt and being the next Tiger Woods, I was offered a job at a Web Hosting company. I learned a lot while at the un-named host (Catalog.com) and have taken that to form FindMyHost and its’ various sister sites.

I look forward to meeting and talking to everyone on HostDiscussion.com. If any one is attending Hosting Con 2008 in Chicago, let us know and we will plan to meet and maybe share a drink or two.

Hi, I’m Richard Guzzo VP at FindMyHost.com. Originally from Australia (now residing in Oklahoma City), I couldn’t help but be apart of this unique company when it launched back in 2000.

With my primary role of taking care of web hosts and ensuring what we promote is accurate to consumers. I like to think I’m a jack of all trades as I seem to have my hand is just about everything within our network.

With the web hosting industry evolving with something new every quarter, I am always excited to see the changes and to talk with new colleagues from all over the world. Sharing their stories, ideas and insight towards the industry is always fascinating and I look forward to being apart of it for years to come.

Feel free to contact me at rguzzo(at)findmyhost.com or 877-346-3694 x124.