After following our previous blog guides you have your hosting brand set up, and you can sell web hosting. Maybe you have the first few customers using your service and they are happy with the support and the service they receive. Now how do you grow your hosting business? Here are a few ideas:
Make Yourself Visible
You are a new business and no one knows about you yet. You need to get mentioned and you need to get linked to. You can contact people, but you should get as many links as you can from good websites. So web forums, review websites, customer websites, friends, contacts. Maybe offer free hosting in exchange for a link somewhere.
You can use tools like ahrefs.com to see what links competitors have.
Customer Engagement
1. Provide a discussion forum to understand your client’s needs and get feedback
As a business owner, receiving feedback from customers is important to know their needs and grow the business that you have. You may provide a forum for your customers to have an open discussion and share. By having this forum you also understand the needs, concerns, and pain points that users face and then you might provide a solution with a product that you have.
In Upmind, we have a discussion forum to gather our customer who wants to discuss any information related to web hosting or our product. You can check it here. From the discussion forum, we can also evaluate and know what kind of feature requests our customers want in the future. This can be a great research for us to improve our service.
You can also be involved in Web Hosting Talk or Reddit to give your thoughts. Please note that don’t do an aggressive promotion, you may promote by giving a sign on your post/ comments - it could make people curious about your product and they will look for it.
A forum also creates a community and is likely to help with word-of-mouth referrals.
2. Publish interesting content to raise brand awareness
Expensive advertising like influencers can be very expensive. Instead of that maybe just create some content and share it.
To gain wider exposure, you can create content. It could be based on trends, tutorials, and fun facts, roughly correlating with your business. You can post your content on lots of platforms such as blogs, YouTube channels, Social media, Quora, and Reddit.
3. Analyze the support that you’ve provided to your customers
Client satisfaction is a matter of building long-term relationships, you might achieve this by providing the best support every time the clients need you. You need to analyze whether your customers are satisfied with the services you provide. If they are, maybe they can leave you a review on a website like Trustpilot or even Google Reviews.
Scaling and Expansion
1. Differentiate your product from your competitors
After doing market research and starting to sell hosting yourself, you will know your strengths versus your competitors. After knowing the advantages you have, you can focus on those parts of your business and highlight them through advertising (like customer service, low domain prices, etc).
You could even add more add-ons to that such as creating a unique product with for example bundled domain registrations.
2. Clever promotions that don’t lose you money
Advertising is expensive, especially with web hosting. You might consider offering a discount which could be an initial loss at first but leads to increased uptake. Remember you are a subscription business so as long as renewals are at your usual price and the customer stays you should make money.
3. Use Metrics
At scale, a hosting business is all about data. What is your customer LTV (Life Time Value)? What is your Churn Rate? What is your CPA (Cost per Acquisition) of a customer? This is the sort of data we will get into in future articles.
4. Keep your products competitive
Watch what your competitors are doing and copy their ideas! If they offer a new feature see if you can offer it too. Make sure your prices remain competitive or even aren’t too cheap!
That’s all from the blog series: Starting a Hosting Business: A Step-by-Step Guide. We hope from our blog you can get knowledge on how to start your own web hosting business and gain customers as well as using our platform, Upmind.
If you still have any questions related to Upmind and how we can integrate with your business, don’t hesitate to contact us via Live Chat or our Forum Discussion.
