theWHIR Blogs - William Toll Web Hosting Blog

Web Hosting Providers and Microsoft WebsiteSpark

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:42:16 -0400

By William Toll Today Microsoft announced their latest "Spark" program, specially designed for Web professionals known as WebsiteSpark. An all inclusive program which includes free leads for our customers, free software and support for the design and development of new Websites, and of course, discounts on licensing for hosting providers. The fact that Microsoft will help drive sales leads to our customers is tremendous. Imagine a small Web design agency getting free leads from Microsoft's numerous demand generation efforts. Web agencies are then able to access the latest Microsoft tool set including Microsoft Expression Web and Studio, Visual Studio 2008, Windows Web Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

HostingCon Session Summary: Email Hosting Trends: Past, Present, and Future, Henry Weber, VP of Operations, FuseMail

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 11:27:19 -0400

By William Toll The first part of Henry's presentation was about the history of email and the original platforms, technologies and providers. Hosted email solutions have been part of hosting packages since the early days of shared hosting back in the mid 1990's. In his presentation Henry Weber, VP of Operations, FuseMail, LLC reviewed the different options that hosting companies have when looking to offer email solutions to clients.

Startups - ISVs, Web 2.0s, Social Apps

Mon, 18 May 2009 15:31:52 -0400

By William Toll 2009 is proving to be the year of the startup. With the economy providing the stimulus to many an entrepreneur, we are seeing a new wave of customers. Entrepreneur's seem to thrive on the "tough economy" and are always looking for ways to "get going" with their dreams and business plans. (aka "When the tough get going"). As hosting providers we were traditionally the home for "production" Websites and applications. With this new wave of customers we are seeing them use our managed dedicated servers and virtual servers to develop, test, iterate, beta and go live with. Startups are now collaborating with developers and key stakeholders worldwide on servers in our data centers.

Microsoft Hosting Summit and New Features for Hosts

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 19:32:19 -0400

By William Toll This year's Microsoft Hosting Summit signaled to me the long path that we have been on to get to a point where the Microsoft Web server is not just another platform but a great platform. Most who have looked at Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0 quickly see the massive improvements in the platform as a Web and database server platform. With support for the popular PHP language and applications through FastCGI many hosts who already offer Windows Server 2008 are seeing an increase in interest from traditionally LAMP customers.

Parallels Plesk Panel 9.0 Enables New Customer Segments

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 12:20:40 -0500

By William Toll At the recent Parallels summit in Las Vegas attendees were learning about many topics with a particular emphasis on Cloud Computing, Virtualization and the various products of Parallels. One product certainly stands out, the product that started it all "Parallels Plesk Panel". Over the past 9 years we have all seen how a hosted dedicated server has gone from being an intangible command line driven server to a highly sophisticated system capable of performing various tasks with a few simple clicks. The competition was strong for a while but now that Parallels has acquired all of the major panels except the other great server control panel from cPanel things are starting to get interesting from the customers perspective.

Hosting Storage and Customer Needs

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 11:56:12 -0500

By William Toll Over the years we have seen disk storage allotments increase dramatically with hosting plans. About 9 years ago a large shared hosting provider had a "leading storage allotment" of 150MB on their $19.95 plan. Back then, utilization was about 20% of that allotment and we all thought, what would a customer do with that space. One of my friends in the industry recently told me that back in the day 7,000MB of storage hardware deployed by a shared hosting company would cost $60,000. Obviously the laws of technology innovation and cost reduction are at play here. Today shared Web hosting companies market 10,000MB with a $4.99 shared hosting plan. That is a dramatic decrease in the market price for shared hosting disk storage. The difference today, when put in perspective is that customers are actually increasing their usage of this storage dramatically. With the digital revolution (audio, video, and images), the increasing size of databases and compliance needs driving record/log storage, we may be entering a period when demand is beginning to outpace supply.

Survey: SMBs Look to Hosting Providers for Support

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 15:45:19 -0500

By William Toll After listening to a few hours of sales and support calls for NaviSite Dedicated Server prospects and customers it became clear to me that SMB's are looking for technical support as much as they were looking for hardware, software and networking equipment! Information technology technical support /server support/application support/networking support are all problems around which that Web hosting providers receive calls and tickets. A combination of a difficult economy and an increasing reliance on employee's access to applications, servers, email and more, SMBs are now no longer satisfied with the level of support full-time employees can provide. We recently ran a survey on our landing pages and social media sites to understand the current satisfaction level that SMBs have with IT support providers. The survey was titled "24/7/365 - Myth or Reality". Interestingly while 68% of respondents said they expect their Website and application servers will run without an issue this holiday season, over 73% said that their IT personnel would not be available at midnight on New Year's Eve. The survey indicated that CEO's seem to know that downtime costs money with 53% of respondents indicating that the first person to know about downtime is the CEO/owner. The survey results also showed that 43% of the time in-house IT support personnel do not answer their phone when at 3am an issue with the IT infrastructure is reported.

Dedicated Hosting Prospects and Their Clues

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 09:29:00 -0400

By William Toll NaviSite recently launched an expanded line of Dedicated Servers and Virtual Dedicated Servers - the design of which was largely shaped by conversations with sales and potential buyers. Listening to sales calls, reviewing sales chats, and interviewing prospects is the most valuable time that can be spent by management and marketing teams. The dedicated hosting space is crowded, and potential customers shop around. In fifteen minutes they have dissected both your competitor's and your website while rapidly forming impressions of your offering and its place in the market.

Ecommerce Hosting Success

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 11:32:00 -0400

By William Toll Ecommerce is the heart of what hosting providers enable for their customers. The definition of Ecommerce can vary from a simple phone number on a Web page or a simple Web lead form, to a complex Ecommerce system with millions of dollars in yearly revenue. Ecommerce is the engine driving everything we and our customers are trying to achieve on the Web. Recently I spoke with PJ Taei, Director of Operations, from WebNet Hosting, LLC , a leading Ecommerce provider and Miva Merchant Premier hosting partner. PJ has been reselling hosting services on the Alabanza instant reseller system for years and is experiencing considerable success by focusing on Ecommerce. He said his customers are selling products in all the top niche categories that make the Web a great place to do business, including jewelry, car parts, vintage clothing and more.

Customer Feedback Drives Product Offerings

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:41:00 -0400

By William Toll New product ideas come from everywhere-customers, vendors, sales teams, competitive pressures, government regulations...you get the idea. Your product dreams are often bigger than your ability to productize and bring them to market. There is a proven way to see through the clutter and prioritize the winners: Listen to your customers. At Intermedia, we help Web hosts, MSPs and other IT service providers bring their customers' demands for better email, Web mail, wireless email and lightweight business applications to market. We prioritize new features and products based on real customer problems articulated to us. It sounds obvious, but too many companies launch new products and features that are not solving even a single problem for their customers. The product, and in some cases the company, are doomed to slow growth and failure since the market messaging never strikes a tone with a customer.