Yet another confusing ‘update’ took part these days. Alexa improved their ranking system - good for them! They say it was for good - the update was fact because of the webmasters and website owners recommendations and tips - and it will be more accurate. This can be easily proven in the next couple of months. From the other side is still standing the good old Google, now, waiting for some eventual resolution of the Yahoo! buyout form Microsoft. The only problem is that the search engines are not quite dedicated to improve the rankings of the website owners, but prefer to battle each other to improve their own rankings!

It is clear that the web hosting industry is one of the most profitable internet businesses in the last decade, or at least it has become. A lot of internet providers or software developers changed their work models and started offering complete services.

This significantly increased the role of marketing and aggressive growth of the web hosting companies. It has become important not only to have a quality data center facility and non stop working people who maintain the business, but it has also become à la mode to provide complete solutions from A to Z.

This was the time when web hosting became adult and a real industry on the web. Then we witnessed buy-outs, mergers, web hosting became real property, being only virtual as business. From another side, we saw a real growth in the domain registration market too, right after the dot com boom finished.

The internet entrepreneurs realized that a successful business is when you meet good domain with quality service and a lot of SEO efforts. The upper level was gained also when the Web 2.0 (as category) has emerged and again re-scaled the picture of the hosting business.

Then it became really “saturated” - well said but in the recent months I started thinking that this is not really true. Why? The reseller hosting business - the way it started was not meant to pose real threat to its parent, but it really did in the past year.

We have seen ‘web hosts’ come and go as we have never before, and in any other business. Yes, it is not hard to start such occupation, yes it can make you some money, but…there are a lot of ‘but’s.

Service Provision Needs Quality

I think it needs, OK, we may start with reliability but then, if you want to offer something and people will pay for it, you better think of its quality! Nowadays, there are so many hosts that I am sure, no one can count the number. Well, may be some one can count the reliable, quality and honest hosts - and the list may be kind of complete but this can be done only be independent professionals - and there are no independent ones! Not anymore.

Saturated vs Overcrowded

These days, almost every designer, web developer or person who has knowledge related to web programing or system administration is ready to open web hosting company. And most of those people have the right knowledge and skills, don’t get me wrong. The problem is coming from the lack of time, money and dedication the people can blend and start good hosting business.

I am not going into debate what are the ‘most important principles’ of starting on the hosting market. But I would say that when starting something new, we need to calculate what we can give and what we can then take off that new thing. There is only one result when we go it and then loose our passion - disappointment for both, us the people we let down. And there people are our customers.

From where to continue…

I am not sure where the problem comes from - it can be from the lack of clear procedures of becoming a working company, complete absence of any industry standards or a lot of other legal issues that companies rely on and take advantage of.

But one thing I am sure of - playing with web hosting business as its simple game is very harmful and takes off the field the ’side to side’ relations and trust. This make it rough to work, to handle and deal with.

The reliability of one internet company always goes through the quality customer support offered. Sometimes the companies hamper their ways to the top while neglecting the importance of the customer service!

Promotion of Good Relations

There is no customer on the planet who may want to receive bad service but still receive the “thing” s/he paid for. Especially not in 21 century. I’ve seen a lot of people who used to be calm and patient with the service people - yes, used to be. No, most of them are finical and demanding, more than the normal :). I am not even sure what caused this change.

The best thing for a company - and the web companies in particular - is to say loudly that it is offering quality service and the customer - client relations are the most important thing. If we talk like this to our customers, our customer service employees will start thinking this was and with the accurate man management and vision, each company can be an example to follow.

The problem is that from one side we have more and more demanding clients and on the same side, there are people who want to be demanding but in attempting to save time and nerves they sometimes skip the part with the customer service representatives.

Demand Responsibility

The in-house training for employees is the part I really like, as I have been through different training approaches so many times that (I’m not really a professional) I started to think that the problem is not in me, but in the trainees and their starting point and behavior. Yes, you may say this is not fair from my side but I think that the right way of successful team building is to ask your employees and customer service representatives to be more responsible and act like the business they are taking care of is not only their own business, but that the clients can rely only on them and their help.

We’ve been witnessed a lot of ads on internet and some of them mark very aggressive techniques, that make me believe web hosting isn’t going right!

There are several ways to attract customers in the web - direct offering of specific services though the corporate web site or advertising on similar sites, directories and others. The second way is branding. This method may include different and varying techniques - the branding methods rely not only to promote a company name or specific product. Using this advertising trick, a company may achieve sustainable results in a long term, no because of the number of attracted clients or sold good or services but because this company made enough to be well know and easy identified for its offerings.

There are also, a lot of “hidden” ways of promotion and marketing- offering free services in exchange of advertising or referring is well know method. Sponsorship is another way of promotion and can be very profitable, depending on the services offered.

I am thinking of the aggressive ways of marketing - what I mean? To make use of the niche you operate in, to take advantage of your rivals using non regulated and amoral techniques.

And to do that on internet is quite easy as the proves cannot be 100% effective. Other negative (if you ask me) elements of the internet marketing could be the non proven or truly authentic statements made public using different channels.

I am not sure if I am being clear but it will be non moral if I give examples and express any subjective opinions.