Free web hosting or discounted hosting offer - Which is better?
Tags: Discounted hosting offers, Free hosting offers, Hosting, Running a Hosting Business
One of the most common marketing strategies in webhosting business is to offer free hosting accounts for a limited period of time for certain duration, say an year of free hosting. Next comes is the heavily discounted hosting plan offers such as 50% discount on a year of hosting. But which is better from a long term perspective?
Free webhosting offer - the pros and cons
You will need a budget to offer free web hosting to customers. If your business is not doing well, offering free hosting will not help you make more money but only bring in more customers. The new customers on free hosting plans bring in additional burden on your business in terms of support tickets, server maintenance and other issues which require that you spend some amount of time to keep them happy.
But after the free hosting duration is over, there is no guarantee that those customers will pay for extending their accounts with your business. Not only that, since it’s free hosting, customers may abuse the free hosting plan and it can impact other customers who have their accounts on the same server. They may choose to discontinue hosting with you and host their sites somewhere else, where there is a free hosting offer.
One way to make some money from free hosting is by charging for add-ons and any upgrades on the free hosting plans, but that too will not give you enough money to cheer about.
Discounted web hosting offers - the pros and cons
You can offer discounted hosting plans at any point of time. Make sure that you have enough capacity to handle the customers who will buy these plans. Such offers not only bring you many customers, you also make money and chances of customers extending their hosting accounts is also much higher when compared to the free hosting plans. You will still have to take care of support and other issues and ensure that the customers are happy and don’t complain about lack of support and attention just because they opted for discounted hosting plans.
When customers are happy, you also get free word of mouth publicity that will get you many more customers. This doesn’t happen often with the free web hosting plans.
When should you offer free hosting plans?
Only when your business is doing well, you are in profits and want more customers and hosting accounts with you. Remember, with free hosting plans, you get customers but not money. How you manage to retain customers after the free hosting duration is over is up to you and that’s what decides how successful your offer was. Retaining customers after the offer is over is the measure of the success of free hosting offer.
When should you offer discounted hosting plans?
Irrespective of your business doing well or not, you can offer such plans to get more customers. This is where overselling is best utilized. Offer such plans when your sole objective is to get more customers than making more money. With more and more customers coming in, money will follow later. So, don’t worry about the money part. Plan well on your resources, that’s it.
You know your business better than anyone else. Plan well and think twice before you make any offers.
[tags]Hosting, Free hosting offers, Discounted hosting offers, Running a Hosting Business[/tags]
