

Ask HN: How do I penetrate the hosting market? - Allocator2008

Just for fun, I recently purchased a domain, www.kinnetekhosting.com, and set up a reseller hosting service on there, basically reselling hosting plans and grabbing a commission from it, in theory. So now I am wondering how to drive traffic? I know places like traffic-shack.com offer targeted traffic for sale. Are there other things one could do? I know hosting has been hopelessly saturated for at least a decade, and thankfully this is not my "main gig" more just a for fun thing, but still I wondered if anyone might have some ideas along these lines. Thanks! :-)
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ErrantX
I tried this in about 2005. Getting any kind of custom was HARD (mostly the
only customers were clients from my freelance web design work).

After 4 years (wow that seems so little really!) we have only a few regulars
and are unable to bring in new custom because of being unable to compete price
wise.

You'll be better off offering "simple hosting" to niches. I.e. one idea I had
was to offer cheap gaming clan websites - with a small forum & all the default
pages a clan would need with a couple of nice looking templates to choose from
(your welcome to use that BTW, no way I have the time to implement it).

Sucessfully reselling space from an account like you have takes serious
legwork.. if it's just for fun I would pass it by :)

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lsc
Try to create something that is more valuable than your competition. Either go
cheaper (difficult, in the shared hosting biz.) or provide some service above
and beyond your competitors (I know of many successful hosting companies that
targeted a certain kind of customer, for example, real-estate agents during
the boom, and basically sold nice templates for their niche.)

Another thing I notice is that if you post good technical info about what you
are doing, you get good links (and thus pagerank.) You need documentation
anyhow, so cleaning it up and posting it online is like free advertising.

But what do I know. it's not like my hosting company is wildly successful, and
I had what was once a unique product, Xen VPS hosting (I started before ec2,
using Xen2 on NetBSD. Of course, I now have a whole lot of competition, and I
don't have the cool provisioning systems they do.) and I still have a almost
2x price advantage over my nearest competitor. My biggest problem is
credibility. I need to dedicate a weekend to web design, as my current website
is inconsistent and out of date. (I have some technical issues, too... but
after last weekend, I've cleaned most of those up. I will be writing up a
thing on puppet this coming weekend. So embarrassing. I was aware of the
problem, and policy was to fix it on all new servers, I just forgot to edit
the config files in question. Yeah. moving to puppet.)

Still, my company is growing about as fast as I can get new infrastructure up
(which isn't as fast as you'd think. I've got two other essentially full-time
jobs.)

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noodle
if all you're doing is reselling hosting from some other host, you're unlikely
to penetrate the market at large.

find a niche and cater to it.

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rms
Start practicing your SEO voodoo

