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How do you get customers

JJW

JJW

NLC
NLC
Starting out how did you get customers? How did you get multiple customers where did you advertise. I am finding it especially difficult for somebody who has not been open for a year to get new clients. I see people in these forums who put new hosts down as not reliable. Looking for hints. I can spend some money but i am not gonna drop $100's of dollars on something that will not work. Can someone please give me some tips.
 
socheaphost said:
Starting out how did you get customers? How did you get multiple customers where did you advertise. I am finding it especially difficult for somebody who has not been open for a year to get new clients. I see people in these forums who put new hosts down as not reliable. Looking for hints. I can spend some money but i am not gonna drop $100's of dollars on something that will not work. Can someone please give me some tips.
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If your not willing to spend a couple hundred dollars on your business then you planned this badly, and probably joined for a "get rich" reason.

Make sure you have a business plan, which includes a financial plan. That should be your bible - forever - when you run your business.

Paid advertising helps. Sadly, to get publicity in the major places you need money. So, if your not willing to drop between $100-$1000 a month on advertising don't expect much, your going to have to go to forums and actually compete for clients in the request area or the offers section.

I've seen hosts that have been open for a little over a month actually make profit and expand. These hosts generally go for a specific advertising market, VPS for example is a hot market right now.

Doubt is a huge crutch for any business. If you doubt it is going to work, don't even try.

I've seen people put down new hosts as not reliable as well, and usually for a good reason. People have no reason to lie, 99.99% won't do it randomly or out of spite. There are two (main) reasons people put down hosts: A: You have done something to anger them, which includes lousy service. B: They want to be an --- and just ruin a host.

If you have done something that caused your business to have a negative rep, I would look into that and fix it.

Another major problem when it comes to new hosts is they offer unreal deals. "1TB BANDWIDTH FOR $2 A MONTH!" or even "80TB SPACE AND UNMETERED BANDWIDTH FOR $4 A MONTH!". Nobody is going to take them seriously.

Then comes the customer service. You can't just check up on the place once every two to three days. Doing that will pretty much guarantee you will fail. You need to be there constantly, every single hour that you can be. You have to be on top of things. If you can't do that, hire someone that can.

I hope my advice helps you, although I very much doubt you will listen since I have given you this advice before and you did nothing.

Essentially, if you do all of the above you will get a few clients. But you also need to understand the shared hosting market is saturated to an extreme, and if your not willing to wait one or two years to start breaking even in (some) cases, you should quit while your ahead of yourself.

Usually, a business takes between one to two years to break even, and that is pretty much any business and not just hosting.

Good luck.
 
not worried about time just it is disheartning when you can offer high quality service and are not getting customers. I have listened to some things that you have said. Most of the things you have said though have put down my company as in one thread you said look at his name so-cheap-host. I am not here to flame you or anything like that. I really love the webhosting business. I did not plan to get into this but i got such a good deal i could not pass it up. Now i am sitting here wanting to provide quality service but with out people giving me a chance to show them what kind of service they will get how are you supposed to build a name?
 
socheaphost said:
not worried about time just it is disheartning when you can offer high quality service and are not getting customers. I have listened to some things that you have said. Most of the things you have said though have put down my company as in one thread you said look at his name so-cheap-host. I am not here to flame you or anything like that. I really love the webhosting business. I did not plan to get into this but i got such a good deal i could not pass it up. Now i am sitting here wanting to provide quality service but with out people giving me a chance to show them what kind of service they will get how are you supposed to build a name?
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Go free and make people happy. It's been working for me so far. Offer paid on the side.

Before you do anything else, sit down for a couple of minutes and think. Hard. On why you want to do this, what is your long term goals and how much are you willing to spend. After you do this, research how to write business and financial plans and then actually write one. Not some 4-5 page plan. Make sure it includes a lot of detail as well.

Also, you should really remove the 1TB Monthly transfer offer on your site that your selling for $8.
 
I appreciate any feedback. I did not say i am not willing to spend money, i am not willing to spend money on something that doesn't work. Also i have decided that you are right on the bandwidth deal, i am lowering it. I have it to sell but your right it does seem odd.
 
in hosting biz you have to be patient. get some customers in your personal contacts, friends, family local people to compensate your running cost. spend extra on marketing.
google adwords is easy but you have to choose the options carefully.
advertise on different site that are relevant to web hosting. dont go for PR blindly but check
alexa or traffic stats. how much site have traffic, buy ad space and see the result
also your setup and support should be strong enough to handle customer. first people get customers with efforts but loose them quick because of poor services, support or downtime.
these customers post bad reviews for this host which make them down and leads to failure.

-Be patient
-keep working
-track some local customers to meet your running expenses
-spend some on ads
-make your infra structure,and support strong enough to happy customer
-good luck , Always pray to God with heart who helps every one
 
Start you hosting with hosting your friends and their friends. That is the best way. If they like your services they will reffer other people to you as well
 
I'm new into this , but one thing i've learnt from dark soul here is that you should keep the user in control and should take a back seat yourself .
Let the customer know that you're interested in what he is .
And believe me , that helps .
Dark soul made me feel good when i requested him for hosting .
And i see him online on the most odd hours for a u.s. resident :lol:
But that's what i like about him , he's used to being an insomniac to help out a customer from another time zone .

I must also not forget prompt response .
And that i got to see from both color host and dark soul .
Both of them went to a gr8 extent to help me out if i had any problem .


And courtesy , be polite and careful with the words you use .
The person on the other end might misunderstand you and might be bye bye .
And if you're polite , even if that fellow goes to the limit of irritating you , will make the person realise he's speaking to an enterprising person who means business . And believe me it takes enormous patience .

Also be truthful even if it loses you a few customers . I had a chat with Marvin and when i asked for something he politely refused saying it was against his company's policy and the deal didn't go through . But it made me respect him .
There has to be a line between being helpful and following your policy(of course that doesn't mean you simply stick to your stance irrespective of circumstances . That'll push your customers away) , you should enforce your policy to a reasonable extent , but never throw it in the face of your customer . A good deed might not reach 7 ppl but a bad word spreads around to 7000 of them . Years worth of reputations can be lost just in a second :)


Well that's all i could learn from a couple days around into this business .
And i'm still learning ;)
have a nice day .
Best Regards,
Aloycasmir
 
~ServerPoint~ said:
Start you hosting with hosting your friends and their friends. That is the best way. If they like your services they will reffer other people to you as well
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Can't agree more.
First start providing a good professional job, the customers will follow you.
Market locally.
 
Something I have had some success recently is to not go to places like this to advertise where my ads get promptly buried by thousands of others. I'm building on a bare minimum budget, as unlike many businesses I don't have a lot of money to start with. My goal is to start with the next to nothing I have now, and build up to a stable and profitable business to eventually replace my current day job.

Instead of spending all day responding to requests on a site like this, or spending money that I flat out do not have on professional advertising, I go to sites related to my own interests and start talking to people. In doing so, if the community seems friendly enough and people seem interested in trying things, I'll mention that I am starting a hosting business.

Usually a couple of people will step forward and say they are looking for a server for a project they've had in mind, or mention that so and so they know has a site that needs to be relocated. So far it's gotten me three free hosting customers in the past month, after only two months of seriously advertising.

With any luck I can use this method to find paid hosting customers as well too.

It's no substitute for mainstream advertising like newspaper, radio, and internet ads.
But it is still another way to advertise on a budget.

Now on that note, when I do get cash in hand again for other odd jobs when not working on my day job or on my hosting startup, I probably will spring for a real ad. Talking to other business owners has shown me that it is still faster and far more effective in the long run if you can tell a lot of people in a short amount of time by running a professional ad campaign instead of relying on word of mouth all the time.
 
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In any case there are should be reason which move you to get started.
That is very competitive area and I think you need to understand that. So before you start I think you should have at least few customers.
Try to find your niche first. That is also very very important
 
When i posed this question i was very dismayed by what i saw others saying about host who have been in business less than 1 year i have since gained a few clients and such and we are starting to make good on our business promises. We would like to thank all that have answered this thread.
 
This is a fabulous post. I do many of these things already, but look forward to implementing the others. The good resource should be brought in bookmarks.
 
Just a few things that would turn me off from hosting with you:

- You have a negative rep here.
-Your website has "cheap" in the title which makes me think if the last time I purchased hosting from a "cheap" company, it didn't end well.
- If I remember correctly you had some downtime.

Anyway no offense to you, just saying what I think would help you get more clients.
 
Well i appreciate your respnse penguin.

I have been trying to up my reputation. We did have some down time when we first started. We have since fixed all are issue's we are now hosted at hostdime which makes a big difference. Also we just fixed a billing issue. We just added a dedicated server line. So we are growing and expanding. So penguin if you want rep me help me get back out of the red it shouldn't take much to get me there.
 
Here is what i did and i believe what everyone should do to get customers

- Get local customers build your company
- Open it to public and increase your conversion rate.


Things that are good for increasing your conversion rate.

- Good Design
- Easy checkout
- Merchant Account
- 2 or more payment methods
- SSL
- Easy product information
- Free Stuff with the packages
- promotions
- Live chat and phone support.
- Friendly agents.

I can name you 100 more stuff, but those are the main ones i follow. I think i need some stuff of those list as well.
 
Well most of these people have some valid points however you never want to go with any host that says "Unlimited" next to any of their features. Unlimited usually means that they have poor servers, bad support and are just trying to cover it up by making an offer that looks good.
 
Doolvehek said:
Well most of these people have some valid points however you never want to go with any host that says "Unlimited" next to any of their features. Unlimited usually means that they have poor servers, bad support and are just trying to cover it up by making an offer that looks good.
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Finite* features like diskspace and bandwidth. Though bandwidth is potentially "infinite", because you can get colo with an unmetered port, however the thing there is that it's not smart to allow customers to have as much bandwidth as they want.
 
The budget anyone is spending on advertising and the marketing strategy depend of many things - the class hosting services the company offers, the consumer or b2b market its targets, etc.

There are niches that are very competitive (shared hosting for example) and others that are still undeveloped.
 
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