There is story of David and Goliath where Goliath would come and challenge everybody - "is there anyone amongst you who would dare to fight against me?" Who would dare to fight against him? He was a giant, there was nothing one could do to humble him.
David saw the situation in a different manner. Whatever he threw at
Goliath it was sure to hit him. In the end we all know that David
did win. The internet is also huge.
Here's another story from the Indian Epic Mahabharat where once
Dronacharya takes the Pandavas to the forest to test their skills in
archery. He hung a model of a bird on a branch and asked each of them,
one by one, to take aim at the bird and tell him what they saw. He
first called Yudhishtar, the eldest of the 5 brothers. Yudhishtar
saw the entire cosmos of which the earth was a part, then a tree which
was a part of the earth, and finally a bird hung on the branch of the
tree. Dronacharya asked him to sit down. One of the brothers, Arjun,
could see only the eye of the bird, and nothing but the eye. He shot
the bird right in the eye cause he could see nothing but his target.
While the internet is huge and global, when it comes to marketing the
same
old rule apply - The customer is the
king. He is an individual and has his needs well defined. The
internet maybe the Goliath, but each customer is the bird's eye.
The challenge for the webhost is thus in finding the bird's eye.
Webhost
need to create plans which suit the customer's needs rather than just
focusing on things like price, uptime, reliability, support and so on
which are all important. At the same time all decent webhosts today can
offer similar plans , prices, guarantees and support.
A few years back we did some research in the selling aspect of the
hosting
industry. Our first reaction was that the cheapest host would do well.
Or it would be even better if the cheapest host offered the best
features and the maximum bandwidth and diskspace. Finally, we concluded
that the largest host would be the cheapest host with the maximum
bandwidth and diskspace, with the greatest support and this host would
have ads all over the place. This may actually work out for many, but
the Return of investment (ROI) may take more than a life-time.
The webhosting industry comprises mostly of SMEs. For them huge
investments in marketing may not be the best solution. Yet, there are
many webhost who have grown from a reseller hosting system to a few
thousand servers within no time. And interestingly none of the hosts we
studied were actually selling cheap. They all focused on the right
target markets. They create a niche market for themselves.
One webhost focussed only on resellers and called it private label reseller programs.
They gave out more diskspace and bandwidth and charged a higher value.
Their benefits - lesser customers, higher cash turnover and lesser
support requests as the resellers looked after their own customers.
Another webhost focussed on
webmasters only. Webmasters generally have more than one site.
Hosting is not their prime Business and they want an affordable
solution. Also, as most webmasters are tech savvy what they needed more
than regular support is a community where they can interact with
various other webmasters. Needless to say that these hosting companies
did grow fast.
It did not take long for the clones to come and soon such plans became
a standard in the industry. Webhosts are again facing the same
challenge on howto effectively market. One approach webhosts can take
is to focus on certain services of
hosting only. Such as email
only hosting. This would be
useful for people for whom email is very critical. They may prefer to
have the emails on another server which is exclusively for emails only.
So even their ma
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