Ricky’s Online Business Blog

This is a guest post from Pin, the founder of 1.com.my. He runs a company that hosts emails. Pin is very kind to offer to help you solve your problem related to your email hosting. Just let him know what it’s about.

1. Unlimited storage & bandwidth

(Web hosting provider: We pray a lot so that none of you are hosting a gigantic MP3 download site. What? Don’t you know that we build our hosting business by over-selling?)

2. Unlimited mailbox

(This is our marketing trick to make you signing up email hosting with us. Who really cares if you have 500 email users and overload our email server! We host more mailboxes than we can afford to in each server so that we can lower down the price of your hosting.)

3. Unlimited add-on domain name

(Mixing different sites together are not a good practise, we know that from day one. But since everyone like the magic word ‘Unlimited’, why not this one?)

4. 99.999999% uptime

(Customer never ask for an uptime report to justify our actual uptime. If they do, we can come out with one which they will never understand except that if they are from Mars)

5. Reliable customer support

(Smart customers are only a step away to know that we are sucks by googling, eg ‘exabxxxxx sucks’. See, not many are doing that, we are always safe!)

6. Free domain name

(What they do not know is that we are going to make them pay it back on the next year. If that is not enough, we can send them bills for DNS, Migration Fee, Domain WHOIS update fee, you name it.)

7. No-downtime migration

(We can point our finger to countless parties when there are any downtime – TM, DNS, Dogs & Cats, Weather, etc)

I’ve been dealing with a well-known web design company who developed a content management system for my customer’s web site. It is found that something does not work properly on the web site. PHP script errors appear on web page when the customer tries to update their web site.

Unfortunately, the web development company does not want to fix the error for the customer, unless they are paid a certain amount (which I think they should not charge at all) to “upgrade” the system. They claim to have developed the scripts using PHP version 4, but now that the server has been upgraded to PHP version 5, the scripts do not work any more. That is, they blame the problem on the server.

I checked the scripts but did not find any problems due to new PHP version. I found the errors as common programming errors, which can be fixed easily by them who developed and understand the system. In addition, the developer could not answer me when asked for exactly what outdated features of PHP 4 that the scripts are using that are not working now.

They refused to fix the problems for the customer, saying that the web site is not hosted with them. But I think this is not a very good reason, because a web site can be hosted and deployed anywhere, not necessarily theirs. They should support the web site no matter where it is housed.

Now they say they are no longer interested in serving the customer, and they say since I am so “expert”, then I should fix the errors for the customer. Well, even if I am in web development business, they are still the one who created the system. I think it is their responsibility to support the customer and not just simply pass the buck and walk away.

Still thinking of using search engines, email newsletter and affiliate marketing to promote your products and services on Internet?  While these are essential, let’s not be outdated.  It’s all about marketing on social media nowadays.

Yes, the Internet is getting more and more “social”, with real people using the Internet to interact and influence one another.  Much thanks to the advent of blogs, and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter (strictly speaking, blogs are not social media).  Even the older generation have jumped on the bandwagon and claimed an account on Facebook.  In fact, if you are not “in” social media nowadays, you are “out”!

Therefore, the social media now presents a natural channel for marketing your products and services on such increasingly social online networks.  After all, many people have always been looking for others’ opinions when deciding to buy (or not buy) something, used to be offline, but now online also.

In the local hosting industry, it seems hosting providers are picking up on marketing through social media.  I know one company has set up their profile on various social media such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Plurk!

This company is capitalizing well on social media.  They offer money for bloggers who write about them.  They give out prizes for lucky draw winners who follow them on Twitter, tweet about them, and ask others to retweet about them.  They also own a company page on Facebook and promise to offer discounts for domain names based on the number of Facebook members who become their fans.  Yeah, many social media jargons here, I know

I also had set up a Facebook group and a Twitter account for BizPartner, and tried to create some buzz in social media.  I have yet to achieve what I want, but I’m trying, and learning.

And we can expect that more and more hosting providers will soon start to use social media for innovative marketing, branding and customer relationship building.

A business partner asked how to sell hosting to customers when there are other hosting providers who can offer super large hosting space at dirt cheap rate.  For example, 100GB at RM180 only!

While I’m facing the same problems competing in such fragmented hosting industry, these are a few pointers we managed to come up with.

Firstly, don’t try to fight them with even larger space at even lower price.  How about going to the other extreme, by selling small but enough hosting space at half or quarter of their prices?  For example, selling only 100MB at just RM80?  But the customers need to be educated that they actually won’t make use of so much space.

Secondly, expose the tricks (even deception) used by hosting providers.  Nowadays anyone can sell any large amount of hosting space at cheap rates using the “overselling” kind of business model.  This works because statistically an average customer will not use even 10% of the space promised to them.  Some customers are “space-greedy”.  They need to know the inconvenient truth in the hosting industry.

Thirdly, bundle hosting service with other services with prices you have more control on, such as web design.  This way, customers may not know even if you charge them double the hosting prices.

Fourthly, but a very bad strategy – fight the competitors with even larger space at cheaper price!  We know some customers will be lured into this but actually never use so much space anyway.  Nevertheless, I’m against this as it is over-promising.

Last but not least, seek out blue ocean strategies that you no longer need to compete with other hosting providers in such a red ocean.  But seek out new markets and sell to them some services which include hosting service.

Just as an example, how about an online service for couples getting married?  Many couples get married every week.  More and more couples start to want a wedding web site to commemorate such big event!  In providing such service, you no longer compete with other hosting providers but customers will have unknowingly bought your hosting service anway.