Web Hosting Profits - September 2006
Welcome to Web Hosting Profits. In this
edition:
Article: How
to target the lucrative corporate and Windows developer marketNew off the shelf marketing tools to be
released in October. A major study conducted by IDC has predicted the US webhosting
market to grow at a rate of over 13% per annum for the next five
years. By 2009, the market is predicted to reach $11.4 billion. But
if you’re looking for ways in which to grow your webhosting
business aggressively, you’ll already be aware of how the enormous
downward pressure on pricing for basic hosting can making it really
hard to drive revenue growth from your customer base. While you are growing fast, price competition is holding back
your profits. But while competition in the market looks set to put
increasing pressure on your business, the good news is that there
is a way to get you what you want… read
more. |
Offer: New SMB marketing tools
for Helm hosts
Microsoft themselves offer plenty of
presentations, fact sheets and other tools produced for Windows
Server to back sales.
At WebHost Automation, we will be making
specialised marketing tools available over the coming months for
our customers.. Tools that will help you crack the valuable
corporate hosting dollar. Watch this space!
Webhosting is becoming and increasingly tough business.
Competition is becoming stiffer and margins are getting tighter as
pricing is forced down further and further. Yet, there is a huge
opportunity in the market for webhosts to achieve success and to
make more money. The biggest requirement is to increase your average revenue
per user, while ensuring the solution is affordable, easy to
install and operate, and is well within reach. The best way to do
this is by picking up those revenue opportunities you may be
missing with current customers. Leading business experts agree on one
thing… read more. |
Technical Tips: Automated credit card
billing with Helm
From the help desk with Rob Kershaw, Tech Support
Engineer
Do you want to let your customers pay via credit card when
they sign up for a hosting plan with your company? With Helm, you
can offer this powerful feature, without purchasing any additional
stand alone billing software.
First, you’ll need to sign up with a Payment Gateway that
offers recurring billing. A number of these gateways are supported
by Helm, and you can
see the
list here. Once you have an account with the gateway of your
choice, simply follow the relevant Configuration Guide for that
gateway in order to integrate it into Helm.
Once done, you can configure the Auto-Signup script and start
offering the packages you have set up in Helm to your customers
through your own company website. The
Helm Administrator Guide will go into more detail.
New modular approach lowers risk and enables you to profit
from the next big thing (whatever it is). We would all like to be able to predict the future. Wouldn’t
it be great to know exactly what will happen in the next year or
two? How valuable would that information be to your business? But
as much as everyone has an opinion of the future, if anyone was to
tell you they knew what the next big thing will be, we all know
that at best it would be a guess. Would you gamble your business on guesses? I bet you would say
no. But you might be surprised to know that most hosting businesses
do exactly that…. read more. |
Customer Focus: Windows
switch saves money for Helm host
We receive many emails each day from hosts looking to move to
Helm from other products or even looking to move from Linux to
Windows. Here's one I received just the other day:
Good Morning Mark,
We originally setup our hosting environment on Linux based
on keeping costs down. However overtime that proved not true.
The fact is that running on Linux isn't as expensive as a Windows
platform but it's more expensive than what we thought and so the
intended cost savings disappeared. In addition since we are
primarily a Microsoft shop we would increase the number of
engineers that could support a Windows platform vs. Linux also
lowering the support costs for Windows. By using HELM we
intend to increase the overall ability to manage and support, and
deploy more functionality to customers thereby lowering costs again
and increasing features and services for our clients.
So at the end of the day, we feel that the switch from our
Linux based hosting to Windows/HELM based hosting will save us
money, headaches, and most importantly increase our reliability and
offerings to our clients which will end up in the bottom
line!!
Gino A. Manna
ML3 Group,LLC