Hermes Hosting
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Word of mouth seems legit. WHT is good but as someone says people look for cheapest hosts over high quality
Getting new clients ~ How did you do it?
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QHoster.com
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WHT is such a jungle, your free offer will disappear from page 1 in few hours. Better write in smaller forums and get more personal. Try to be creative if you do not have a pile of cash to spend.
Word of mouth is a powerful form of advertising, and I'd recommend making use of it. If you take care of your customers and treat them like they're a human being, as well as provide an at least semi-decent service for your price range, chances are they'll recommend you to their friends or when there's a post asking for hosting advice.
So far, word of mouth has been our third most valuable asset at Ready2Frag. We market to a different community of people, that being gamers, but the basic principles of it are about the same. Run your business well, meet or exceed their (reasonable) expectations, and provide good, fast, personalized support.
So far, word of mouth has been our third most valuable asset at Ready2Frag. We market to a different community of people, that being gamers, but the basic principles of it are about the same. Run your business well, meet or exceed their (reasonable) expectations, and provide good, fast, personalized support.
Spend all of your efforts providing great services to your clients, those clients will refer others. Try to understand your customers, and have clear policies on how to handle various issues, bend the rules to help the customer the first time the customer has issues, explaining at the same time that you have a paid solution if they need more help in future, etc (this applies mostly to unmanaged services, e.g. "I've logged in and installed lighttpd for you, if you require further assistance please consider one of our managed hosting plans, or hiring a sysadmin to work on your unmanaged server.").
Ignore comments from naysayers, people will naturally hate your brand as you grow for various reasons (their biz failed, you wouldn't give them a below cost deal, you don't have free cake with the server, w/e) even if they have never been a customer. These people will chime in on your threads without any sort of prompt, bumping your week old threads and gaining you more views and sales.
Ignore comments from naysayers, people will naturally hate your brand as you grow for various reasons (their biz failed, you wouldn't give them a below cost deal, you don't have free cake with the server, w/e) even if they have never been a customer. These people will chime in on your threads without any sort of prompt, bumping your week old threads and gaining you more views and sales.
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This is my first post 
Easy way to protect from fraud orders is install maxmind and check all new orders manually as still maxmind let fake address, for example, last day I had such order as Adress 1 Delhi Address 2 Delhi Country India and my fraud protection accepted it. Also, this is important make your refund policy and TOS against any charge back so you can show it to the bank or any gateaway you dealingwith of course, this won't work in most PayPal cause but in cause.if buyer decide to charge back of reason unauthorised transaction you are ready to answer it with protection of seller. I have to start to worry about these after last charge back which was €300 from stripe normaly this was happening to me with $2 Transractions etc. I'm still fighting with Stripe hope to win it.
About getting clients.
Best way is advertise on forums which I won't mention here but there are few good more also try be active and friendly to your clients this is importnat part as client start to like your host he will invite his friend and his friends start inviting others so make sure to have some discounts coupons ready even 5% off.
Also if you like to get fast clinets look at WHT but expect lots of fraud orders from that forum and some WHMCS SQL injection if you using WHMCS of course. also make blog for your website and try make some tutorials, etc so it will make extra pages on Google so it will be good for your SEO. And extra pages in google with specific words like VPS or how to install nginx for example.
Anyway maybe this is not one of my best posts which are clear (as it's not clean) but that's my experience with marketing.
I little went little offopic with the fraud butanyway maybe it will help someone with my small amount of information
Anyway good luck
Easy way to protect from fraud orders is install maxmind and check all new orders manually as still maxmind let fake address, for example, last day I had such order as Adress 1 Delhi Address 2 Delhi Country India and my fraud protection accepted it. Also, this is important make your refund policy and TOS against any charge back so you can show it to the bank or any gateaway you dealingwith of course, this won't work in most PayPal cause but in cause.if buyer decide to charge back of reason unauthorised transaction you are ready to answer it with protection of seller. I have to start to worry about these after last charge back which was €300 from stripe normaly this was happening to me with $2 Transractions etc. I'm still fighting with Stripe hope to win it.
About getting clients.
Best way is advertise on forums which I won't mention here but there are few good more also try be active and friendly to your clients this is importnat part as client start to like your host he will invite his friend and his friends start inviting others so make sure to have some discounts coupons ready even 5% off.
Also if you like to get fast clinets look at WHT but expect lots of fraud orders from that forum and some WHMCS SQL injection if you using WHMCS of course. also make blog for your website and try make some tutorials, etc so it will make extra pages on Google so it will be good for your SEO. And extra pages in google with specific words like VPS or how to install nginx for example.
Anyway maybe this is not one of my best posts which are clear (as it's not clean
) but that's my experience with marketing.I little went little offopic with the fraud butanyway maybe it will help someone with my small amount of information
Anyway good luck
Be clear about your business product offerings. Don't be ambiguous about what your SLA is or the service you will and will not provide at the base level of the hosting.
Make sure the customer knows that, for example, "On-demand, Self-managed" services means you do shit, other than make sure their hosts are up, their IP can be pinged, and their not being DDoS'd.
Management is another beast entireley, If you're only giving them a virtual machine then make sure it's a, "You break it, that's still kewl coz you must have wanted it that way", policy that they are clear on. Don't use words like 'managed', when all that means is that you're job is to ensure that their interface is able to be reached.
And yah.... when you say, "I am this for you, and I ain't this for you...", there's that word of mouth thang, that manifests itself in terms of how honest and straightforward (and hopefully reliably reachable) your services are
Make sure the customer knows that, for example, "On-demand, Self-managed" services means you do shit, other than make sure their hosts are up, their IP can be pinged, and their not being DDoS'd.
Management is another beast entireley, If you're only giving them a virtual machine then make sure it's a, "You break it, that's still kewl coz you must have wanted it that way", policy that they are clear on. Don't use words like 'managed', when all that means is that you're job is to ensure that their interface is able to be reached.
And yah.... when you say, "I am this for you, and I ain't this for you...", there's that word of mouth thang, that manifests itself in terms of how honest and straightforward (and hopefully reliably reachable) your services are
I think one of the main criteria is to be honesty with clients. If the client is satisfied with services it is required to advise you to others, which means that by providing good service and putting a little effort you get much more than spamming everywhere
bigwetfish
New Member
For us it was word of mouth primarily but recently we have been experimenting with targeted marketing. Find a well known client in a certain location (such as a web design studio in Belfast for instance) and we contacted each other design studio with an offer. Heck we even went so far a couple of years ago of doing a donut drop to 100 possible clients locally: http://tosbourn.com/big-wet-fish-get-marketing/ - was a couple of years ago but it was a cool way to get our name out there relatively cheaply
It's such a saturated market so we find honestly word of mouth after someone else gets good customer service has been what has won us clients.
It's such a saturated market so we find honestly word of mouth after someone else gets good customer service has been what has won us clients.
bigwetfish
New Member
Agreed 100%! Being honest especially when there is an unplanned outage. Clients get angry if there is a lack of info but if you are honest and give information regularly throughout an outage we find clients are more accepting.
Hi,
We were able to advertise locally by offering "Free Services" to local businesses, in return we asked them to place a flyer in their window at the location. This has worked for us for the majority of our customers although we are now starting to continue with a Google Adwords campaign as well as Search Engine Optimization. You don't get the majority of your customers from Adwords or any Cost per impression or click. We've noticed that the majority of our customers come from Good reviews-word of mouth. Over the past four years even with our name change earlier this year, we've noticed that 85% of our clients are word of mouth, great uptime and technical support.
It's not hard to gain customers although you must work or outsource your support. If your servers go down or clients have to wait 2-3 days for a reply that's bad customer service.
Just think about this question. If i were operating a Reseller Web Hosting business or any business that needs web hosting. What would i expect? You would expect the same or similar.
When a customer is looking for a business they look for the following Uptime, Customer Support, Assurance, Automated Billing Panel, Professional appearance (such as website, logo). If your website is out of date and your billing system isn't as intuitive. Why would they purchase your product? They would look for something more professional.
Alot of companies say we are unable to update our services on demand because of the overhead. Although overhead is not the issue to why your business isn't professional looking.
For Example...Many providers will provide you with all the necessary needs to build your business. They even offer already designed templates for free for less than $50.00 a month.
The overhead of many providers isn't from companies designing their business for the customer...It's the Owner/CEO taking 95% of the profit. Greedy business owners will have a higher overhead therefore they are not out for the benefit of the customer.
Thank you.
"Our mission is simple: make technology an asset for you, not a problem. Too many times we have seen other IT consulting firms recommend solutions that are not appropriate for the specific client's business or will not take a business' operations into their planning as they routinely bring down an entire business while they perform routine maintenance on a server. That is unacceptable. We won't bring you down in the middle of the day because it is "a better time for us". We work around your business. We strive to make technology integrate seamlessly with your business so your business can grow. As your technology partner, when your business grows ours will grow with you, therefore, we will work hand in hand with you to support your growth."
We were able to advertise locally by offering "Free Services" to local businesses, in return we asked them to place a flyer in their window at the location. This has worked for us for the majority of our customers although we are now starting to continue with a Google Adwords campaign as well as Search Engine Optimization. You don't get the majority of your customers from Adwords or any Cost per impression or click. We've noticed that the majority of our customers come from Good reviews-word of mouth. Over the past four years even with our name change earlier this year, we've noticed that 85% of our clients are word of mouth, great uptime and technical support.
It's not hard to gain customers although you must work or outsource your support. If your servers go down or clients have to wait 2-3 days for a reply that's bad customer service.
Just think about this question. If i were operating a Reseller Web Hosting business or any business that needs web hosting. What would i expect? You would expect the same or similar.
When a customer is looking for a business they look for the following Uptime, Customer Support, Assurance, Automated Billing Panel, Professional appearance (such as website, logo). If your website is out of date and your billing system isn't as intuitive. Why would they purchase your product? They would look for something more professional.
Alot of companies say we are unable to update our services on demand because of the overhead. Although overhead is not the issue to why your business isn't professional looking.
For Example...Many providers will provide you with all the necessary needs to build your business. They even offer already designed templates for free for less than $50.00 a month.
The overhead of many providers isn't from companies designing their business for the customer...It's the Owner/CEO taking 95% of the profit. Greedy business owners will have a higher overhead therefore they are not out for the benefit of the customer.
Thank you.
"Our mission is simple: make technology an asset for you, not a problem. Too many times we have seen other IT consulting firms recommend solutions that are not appropriate for the specific client's business or will not take a business' operations into their planning as they routinely bring down an entire business while they perform routine maintenance on a server. That is unacceptable. We won't bring you down in the middle of the day because it is "a better time for us". We work around your business. We strive to make technology integrate seamlessly with your business so your business can grow. As your technology partner, when your business grows ours will grow with you, therefore, we will work hand in hand with you to support your growth."
Patience is almost the hardest part about it but generally it pays off. Just make sure your model is sustainable and you don't "need" 50 sign ups a month to just break even. That way you’ll be sure to be around for the long run and get a reputation about being “there” for people. I’ve seen posts on forums that seem desperate for sign ups and questions about marketing that I’m sure put off potential clients.
Evolve Web Hosting
New Member
I would agree that word of mouth (referrals) is the best way and doing anything you can to increase organic traffic. We get a lot of clients through the development work we do. They seem to like an 'all in one solution' which is great for us too.