Ask HN: How to make website hosting innovative

[starter]

I'm building a data hosting company with a vision for exceeding any one customer's exceptions. Besides fanatical support and decent hardware, what are some great ideas to make my hosting company attractive to serious buyers?

For example, should I offer a bigger range of features (Mobile Server Management, 24 Hour Live Support etc.) or should I focus entirely on simplifying the process of getting one's website online fast? I want to go from Good to Great.

[patio11]

Find someone (ideally, someone who has never even heard of HN) who is dissatisfied with the business results they get from their current hosting. Ask them why they are dissatisfied with those results and how much money it cost them. Ask them if they would pay 1/10th of that money for hosting which does not have those problems.

If the answer is yes, find four more people like that. If the answer is no, thank them for their time, forget the conversation happened, and talk to someone else.

If you go haring off into feature-land you'll find that nobody who cares about Mobile Server Management will pay you money for web hosting. The ones who need it won't trust their businesses to you. The ones who don't need it but like the idea of the feature have no money to spend but feel like they have all sorts of useful feedback about webhosting, including why they should have dedicated server performance with the responsiveness of their own engineering and ops team for no more than $4 a month. The people who urgently need better hosting will probably not even understand what that feature means, because it includes at least two works of tech gibberish.

P.S. Before you try selling a new hosting solution to anyone try selling a currently existing solution. If you can't do that, you have no hope of selling a new solution. You can learn this without spending six figures in hardware and engineering costs to build a new solution.

[spitfire]

I've heard of HN and i'm dissatisfied with the offerings out there. I want to sign up for a service and have my small business technology problems disappear.

That means: - Help me point my domain to your service. - A built in CMS that humans can actually use, not a directory where I'm expected to shove html (What the fuck is html and can word make it?) - email: Make my domains email, work without hassle - file sharing - let me share stuff with others in my business. - calendaring/meetings - duh, just make it work. - wiki - built in, from the ground up.

None of this is technically difficult. But no one has put in the effort to make these things frictionless yet.

When I brought up the subject of a turnkey linux distribution for business 12 years ago at a meet up I got violently shouted down. I was told businesses HAD to have an LDAP administrator otherwise they would cease to function immediately.

I disagree. Huge amounts of effort have gone into making things technically possible, but very little has gone into making them _useful_ to the average business user. Have a look at hosted wordpress as a model for this sort of thing.

[tomx]

The best hosting experiences I've had are with Linode, AWS and Rackspace. Linode for their brilliant custom control panel - a key differentiator between them and those running stock control panels. Rackspace for the support - if I need to speak to someone, someone will pick up the phone in 2 rings or answer a ticket in 15 minutes. AWS for the fine grained pricing and ability to scale up and down at will.

All of the above are leading or close to leading in their respective niche areas. Their innovations and key differentiators appeal to different types of customer, product and price range, neither which you have stated. It is difficult to give advice on this basis, are we advising how to innovate $x/month bargain hosting or $xx,xxx/month enterprise solutions?

I think you have to identify these clearly before proceeding.

[starter]

Hey, thanks. I like what those companies are doing but I'm already doing the same with shared hosting. I've already committed to really, really good support. I have integrated live support available most of the time customers are awake.

Basically I've got a dedicated server and a virtual server which I use to sell $x/month bargain hosting, just not basement bargains. Short-term goal is to be slightly premium as in $xx/month. I feel that fanatical support and stellar uptime on well-managed servers will make me a fortune in time.

So all that is identified already. In fact, I'm up and running. I just need a better way to get to my 20,000 accounts goal sooner rather than later.

[dholowiski]

I can think of two companies that have made web hosting innovative, and they've gone in totally different directions -> Amazon (AWS) and Heroku. Both solve very different problems, very well. So I guess the question is, who is your target market, and what is their problem? Also, check out prgmr.com - to me his motto 'We don't assume you are stupid.' solves my problem (having to deal with hosting companies that assume I am stupid).

[starter]

Yeah, I've not the access to a massive network with shiny new hardware so my target market is shared hosting for now. Just looking to give it a premium twist instead of playing the $x/month game.

I like that motto. My mantra was all about keeping it simple but that might be worth weaving into my support setup. Thanks for your input!