Choosing a Hosting Package – You can have almost anything including hosting with a poker website

A product is not cheap or popular until its being given away with your breakfast cereal. I paid about £200 for my first domain name and my first web hosting package cost similar amount if not more. Fast forward over 10 years from when I bough my first domain name and hosting package and both domain name registration and web hosting are not only being given away free, hosting companies such as 1 and 1 also give you tonnes or software worth hundreds of pounds just to sign you up to their platform. What is even more remarkable about software, packages and services bundled with web hosting is the diverse website niches being bundled and sold of offered free with web hosting including poker websites .

It is quite interesting to look back briefly to where web hosting companies were a few years ago and where they are now in the hope of partly charting how web hosting companies have increased their services not just significantly but radically. The basic web hosting package in the early days tends to come with only a very basic server side script functionality and the only one on offer back then was cgi which made Perl script quite popular in those days, since then ASP.Net and its predecessor ASP and PHP has eclipsed Per (cgi-bin) in popularity.

With the advent of multiple server side scripting capabilities on web hosting servers come more support call from hosting customer as permission and script coding issues particularly from novice webmasters kept the support desk more busy than the hosting companies would like, this led to the hosting companies introducing pre-installed script in cgi-bin so that all the site owner needs to do is reference the script, more demanding users are still allowed to upload their own scripts but the introduction of pre-installed script certainly help the hosting companies reduce the script related support call.

Before long, the scripting help offered by hosting companies became standard with all major hosting companies, which made more adventurous hosting companies to start thinking of how to differentiate their products from the competition, this let to script such as Fantastico which allows hosting customers to install almost all scripts under the sun at the click of a button.

These days, hosting has move much more away from power users requiring complex scripting to newbies who are just doing things on the net by themselves. Most newbies to ecommerce tend to use eBay, it is not much later when they have exploited the potentials of eBay to it limits that they discover the fact that they can have their own website and have an ecommerce shopping sites. This applies to newbies entering various online businesses ranging from selling autographs online to someone setting up a website for poker games .

It is quite extraordinary that web hosting companies employ specialist who have detailed knowledge of niches completely unrelated to web hosting or web development to organise and arrange poker websites so that it can be bundled with with hosting package. But as the opening paragraph of this article started, a product or services can only be considered popular when it start bundling services that are in themselves more expensive than what you are trying to see, normally a poker website is much more expensive to develop than a one year web hosting package.

Generally, complimentary products are those which add value to your core service or product and hence increase your product sales. The use of complimentary products to enhance sales is not uncommon and all types of businesses make use of such a marketing tool to be successful in the industry. Sometimes, complimentary services may also be used to curb competition or the entrance of new players in the market.

In the web hosting arena, the use of complimentary products and services is not uncommon. Many web hosting companies make use of tools such as complimentary free domain names, or complimentary virus and spam scanning services to attract more and more clients to their services.

However, even if you are offering complimentary services, you may need specific strategies to sell your complimentary services or products to potential clients. Selling services/products that are complimentary to web hosting business is not difficult. All it needs is proper strategies to deliver and sell such products and services.  Following tips will allow you to sell your complimentary web hosting services and products effectively.

1. Don’t Sell Irrelevant Products:

Make sure your complimentary product actually compliments your web hosting service. If you sell an irrelevant product, your customers will be dissatisfied believing that as a business you are confused about your products and services. Irrelevant services create a very bad business image and should be avoided. Make sure your customers find a use of the complimentary product. For example, in a hosting business, selling complimentary shopping cart integration, or offering complimentary maintenance or virus protection will attract more customers to your business as these are valuable services.

2. Monitor the Prices:

Sometimes, web hosting businesses might bundle two or more complimentary products to offer better value to customers. However, for such a strategy to work, make sure you price the bundle effectively. Customers would have no incentive to buy the bundle if the individual features would almost cost the same. The idea behind bundling is to improve the value for money by lowering the price or increasing the benefits or features. For your web hosting business, you may bundle up hosting features of two different plans at lower prices.

3. Compliment the Software with Hardware:

Another useful way of complimenting web hosting services or products is by bundling together software and hardware. For example, you may compliment your outstanding software with quality and branded hardware such as servers. When hardware and software are bundled in a way to complement each other, your clients will not seek other hosting plans.

4. Promote the Complimentary Products/Services:

If you have already designed a complimentary product or services, the next big step is promotion. You need your complimentary product to gain attention and this can only be done via massive promotion. Advertise the products and services via social networking sites or through online forums or word of mouth. You may also use product reviews to sell your complimentary product.

If the above mentioned points are kept in mind while designing and selling complimentary products/services, you may see significant changes in the sales of your hosting plans.

The business generates traffic and new business purely from organic search engine listings and recommendation from existing customers, PPC is not used as part or the marketing mix. The principal site ranks on page one of Google and other search engines for several highly sought after keywords around the business’s core activities of web hosting, domain name registration, ecommerce website hosting and some web design/development.

Technical/Hardware
The company uses two leased custom built cPanel/Linux servers (not tied to contract with data centre), about 1,000 domains on each server. Customer billing, CRM, support ticket and other account issues is managed with owned license WHMC software.

Key Opportunities
Some of the opportunities this business brings to the right buyer are:
• Instantly increase existing client base by about 2,000
• Instantly improve profitability
• Instantly have access to a new sales generation.
• Cross market your existing product/services to the new database you are acquiring

Package included in the sale
- The goodwill built up by the business over the years
- The excellent ranking the business has in search engines
- Entire customer database of all hosting customers
- Entire database of domain name registration customers
- openSRS/Tucows domain name registration account
- Transfer of all domain to your Nominet IPS tags
- Primary domain name used by the company
- OPTIONAL – All domain extension associated with the business (.com, .co.uk. .org.uk, .net and .org)
- OPTIONAL – Take over of the server leases from the leasing company.
- WHMC hosting customer management software.
- 30 days hand on support by current owner

Interested
If you are interested in this advert email : guruonemillion@yahoo.com for more information.

You too can advertise your hosting company or any other webmaster related items on Temi .co.uk free of charge, just use the contact us form.

The argument for a shared web hosting when setting up a website for a small business or an individual is compelling:
- Extremely low cost
- Instant set-up
- No need to worry about server security
- Easy to put a site online and take it down
- No long term contract
- Easy to switch between hosting companies

And the list goes on and on in favour of going for a shared web hosting space instead of a dedicated server.

The flip side of the share web hosting space coin can outweigh the advantages for an ambitious small company because hosting your website on a shared web server instead of having your dedicated server could potentially slow down the growth of your business.

Some well know downside to share hosting includes the fact that you will be sharing your website IP address with a host of other websites, some of them may not be the kind of website you want your business link to remotely but the fact that your hosting company hosts your site on the same IP address may potentially make some bot associate your business website with this undesirable sites.

Recently some of the leading search engines on the net has made the speed of a website part of the ranking algorithm, some hosting companies are notorious for hosting too many sites on one server, this could potentially stop your website ranking as highly as it could if hosted on your own dedicated server. There are many more downside to hosting your site on a shared web hosting platform, if you will like to know more, comment on this post and you will be provided additional reasons.

Dedicated Servers – Not as expensive as you may expect

The two most popular reasons small businesses gives for not taking on their own dedicated server are the fact that its expensive and they lack the technical know how to look after a dedicated server.
These were valid reasons a few year ago. Because of the fact that the dedicated server market is now extremely competitive, with special deals on dedicated servers being offered by many providers including Woo Servers, the cost argument is not a valid reason any more, as a matter of fact if you carefully research the source of your dedicated server, you may find some providers whose cost is a marginally higher than the cost of a shared web hosting.

Dedicated web hosting provider have now recognised the fact that most small businesses do not posses the know how to manage a dedicated server on their own so managed dedicated servers are now a common option.

For ambitious small businesses seeking to free their business website from all the shackles share web hosting can saddle a website with, a dedicated server or a managed dedicated server is the wise choice.