• Howdy! Welcome to our community of more than 130.000 members devoted to web hosting. This is a great place to get special offers from web hosts and post your own requests or ads. To start posting sign up here. Cheers! /Peo, FreeWebSpace.net
managed wordpress hosting

How to effectivly advertise a new hosting business?

GlennBeforeTime

Why is Dan Back!!
NLC
Hello guys,

This place being around since the dawn of time I'm sure that there would be a few people here who have successfully started their own web hosting business with many paying clients. My question to you is, How do you go about effectively advertising such a hosting business (One that is not even 2 months old)

I have tried just about everything through my times of starting up new hosts. I have tried backlink building, SEO, CPM/CPC (Epic Fail) and word of mouth.

What other relevant forms of advertising are there that will have a higher positive effect on actually bringing the traffic looking to purchase from a hosting company?

Thanks Guys.
 
Humm I dont think I am allowed to forward you to read an great blog post on our site, atleast yet...

However Alot of the methods you are using are what you need. I can say that building a solid product that you stand behind 100% allowing you to sleep at night is what you want. When you have that everything falls into place.

I would keep working on what your using, it takes time to get up their. You have to decide what the market you want is.

I would assume the True Website Solutions in your sig. Is your company?
 
Humm I dont think I am allowed to forward you to read an great blog post on our site, atleast yet...

However Alot of the methods you are using are what you need. I can say that building a solid product that you stand behind 100% allowing you to sleep at night is what you want. When you have that everything falls into place.

I would keep working on what your using, it takes time to get up their. You have to decide what the market you want is.

I would assume the True Website Solutions in your sig. Is your company?

Yes, however it is a generalized question. I had a company previously, called UW Hosting, it was stable and had enough clients to pay for it's self, only problem was, it was running for over 4 years and had next to no clients. It hardly grew even though it was advertised, it had good reviews over the net and quite a few backlinks. I'm just wondering, what other forms of advertising that have a much higher rate of success would be applicable to web hosting?
 
I vote for the SEO. SE generate very quality traffic. But according to my knowledge in the sphere. That is not cheap pleasure.
 
Paid Advertising works very well. Here or at WHM (HHO is a little... strange :p would avoid them for advertising).

You need to spend money to make money. From my experiance, a good stable host should make more than they shell out on advertising at FWS or WHT, I know I did when I advertised here, and the company I was working for at the time got their biggest client, that brought in $5k/month (server reseller) from adverising at WHT.

Without offering VPS's/Dedicated servers, its quite hard to get things going, you need to offer something others can't. There are far to many people offering shared/reseller hosting these days - what sets you apart from those other hosts? And don't even dare to say reliablitiy, as how does the customer know that? Uptime? Nope - Other hosts have that too.

Its hard - but you have to think of something - and if you dont have anything (Like most hosts these days) you better think of something and implement it.
 
If you talking about TWS, i think a good start would to be complete the website.
It seems to have made barely any progress in the past 2 months and 1/2 the links go nowhere. I personally would not BUY hosting from a company with a second rate, incomplete website.
 
You don't have an easy order system. If someone is interested in any of your hosting plans, they must manually send an email to request it. Nearly every host has an automated system where a client can order the plan they want, pay and have it setup in less than 2 minutes.

If I was you, I'd get WHMCS and that should help you get a lot more sales. If you already have an automated system, it's not currently being shown to anyone that wants to signup.
 
As I have said before guys, this is a generalized question, stay on topic please. It's not about TWS, it is a generalized question.
 
Paid Advertising works very well. Here or at WHM (HHO is a little... strange :p would avoid them for advertising).

You need to spend money to make money. From my experiance, a good stable host should make more than they shell out on advertising at FWS or WHT, I know I did when I advertised here, and the company I was working for at the time got their biggest client, that brought in $5k/month (server reseller) from adverising at WHT.

Without offering VPS's/Dedicated servers, its quite hard to get things going, you need to offer something others can't. There are far to many people offering shared/reseller hosting these days - what sets you apart from those other hosts? And don't even dare to say reliablitiy, as how does the customer know that? Uptime? Nope - Other hosts have that too.

Its hard - but you have to think of something - and if you dont have anything (Like most hosts these days) you better think of something and implement it.
When you mentioned WHT, do you mean posting in the Offers section or paying WHT for advertising?
 
Complete the site

If you talking about TWS, i think a good start would to be complete the website.
It seems to have made barely any progress in the past 2 months and 1/2 the links go nowhere. I personally would not BUY hosting from a company with a second rate, incomplete website.

I'll second this. Business is a serious undertaking. You can't easily bootstrap a business out of thin air with the clients you wish you had.
 
Free Space into Paid Upsell & Stability

[UW]Glenn;1047110 said:
Yes, however it is a generalized question. I had a company previously, called UW Hosting, it was stable and had enough clients to pay for it's self, only problem was, it was running for over 4 years and had next to no clients. It hardly grew even though it was advertised, it had good reviews over the net and quite a few backlinks. I'm just wondering, what other forms of advertising that have a much higher rate of success would be applicable to web hosting?

So where did UW Hosting go? If you got rid of it, why? In the neighbor threads we're all saying how important it is for a business to be stable. So if you had it paying for itself, that would sound to me like a huge quiet asset.

My personal mindset is that I draw a very sharp distinction between sending money and free sites. Why? Because I rather cynically expect nothing from a free site, so I have no particular grudge if it tanks for all the exciting reasons that mysteriously appear.

But asking for money changes the game. So, if someone impresses me on the free side, I'll keep them in mind for a paid acct. Word of Mouth liason promoters have to be able to trust the business to stay solvent though. Two very nice gentlemen here were on my hotlist for a while. But they too fell prey to Ecclesiastes 'Time, Chance, and Circumstance befall us all'.

I'm on the verge of starting my own private little ratings. Others will do the same. When word quietly seeps around who is worth taking notice of, that's what makes Word of Mouth click.
 
I think that starting web hosting company now is time wasting. No demand right now, unless you would like to start that as additional services
 
I think that starting web hosting company now is time wasting. No demand right now, unless you would like to start that as additional services


I'd have to agree.. The boom of the website hosting industry is over and most people are settled. You can claw your way to enough customers to sustain and possibly write yourself a check. Although, it's a long-hard road and there isn't a surefire way to get customers.

Advertising via Google Ads is a huge waste. WHT/FWS advertising can help but as stated before, it can be extremely expensive.

The only place we continue to see growth is in our shell hosting businesses. 65-70% of our profits come from shell hosting due to:
1. Noone likes doing it.
2. Fraud rate is through the roof.
3. Denial of service attacks daily.

Find a niche and run with it. But even if you do...time to establish is not overnight. It may very well take a year to two years to start turning profit.

You can try Facebook advertising and things like that...Although, we've dumped about $3,000 and haven't turned a single customer off of it recently. Economy is bad and hosting...is in very limited demand.

Good luck
 
Yes have to agree. With the above statment.
This is nothing new. The market was satureted when i cam into it some years back. And it has gotton no better.

Personally my advice is do not waste your time and your money.

The stats say it all 7days of past post.
FWS offers from providers=58
FWS request for providers=8
 
Last edited:
So where did UW Hosting go? If you got rid of it, why? In the neighbor threads we're all saying how important it is for a business to be stable. So if you had it paying for itself, that would sound to me like a huge quiet asset.

I signed over the business to my partner because I had no time to manage it anymore. And with the issue of 2CO declining every payment we ever got from them, then charging us premiums for the payment <.< I couldn't handle the stress of waking up every morning to check my emails to find that 2CO had declined another payment and sent me an invoice >.<
Need less to say, the business was never able to grow. And I could no longer sustain it on a part time (15 hour per week) wage and the insane growing costs that is the Australian Market.

When all of that added up, the business was expected to no longer be an asset for myself and I felt that I owed it to my clients to hand the business over to my second in charge who was more able to support it then me. However, I do not know what happened to it after that. I think my clients decided to move on. But now I have learned so much more about running a business and how to make a sale, and the most important part, customer / client service and support and will not make that mistake again. I also now have a steady full time job which can support so much more for me. When I was part time, I received in excess of 50 hours per week at some stages, and while that money is very helpful, the amount of time spent took it's tole, so as soon as I was able to, I went to Full Time. So that's what happened to UW Hosting.
 
You might try to pay for generating leads, but I've heard it doesn't always have the conversion ratio that it should have.
 
A bad way to advertise is google ads, biggest waste of money. Cost me $155 for 0 conversions once, its a disgrace.
 
A bad way to advertise is google ads, biggest waste of money. Cost me $155 for 0 conversions once, its a disgrace.
I believe that your ads were not well designed. That is not easy to have ads which will work on google. I have used some seo firms to complete our ads for google
 
Back
Top