We Talk with HostedToday President, Rob Moore

Hostedtoday has joined the competitive world of Budget Unix Hosting. What distinguishes your company form the competition?

When we were in the development stages of HostedToday, there were several "key ingredients" that we wanted to make sure we had:
1) a very simple website without any flashy graphics or animation. We went out of our way to design a website with very little "design" features.... a very simple site that would do very poorly at a web design competition! After all, our customers are web designers.... not us.... so why try to compete with them?
2) a lot of support information so our customers and potential customers could get the answers they needed easily. We contracted to have over 40 quality support tutorials built so that our customers can "watch" what they should do, and made them available on our website. We also put together countless articles and help files to help answer questions, which took a long time to do.
3) True 24/7 support available to our customers. For this we hired a support company so that they could be available at all hours of the day/night, including holidays and weekends. Support tickets are answered within an hour, in a very friendly, courteous and ACCURATE manner.
4) one product that appeals to 95% of those needing web hosting. So we put together 1 package that has more storage space than most people will ever need (500 MB), loads of bandwidth (5 GB), free stats, domain parking, addon domains, email, and a control panel to manage it all, plus many popular tools to make our customer's websites come to life. With this much storage space, and no real option of upgrading to something better (unless customers need even more storage or bandwidth), it makes the buying decision much less complicated.

You have opened ResellerToday. Are there plans for additional offerings such as dedicated servers or windows hosting plans?

We launched ResellersToday shortly after HostedToday as an expansion on our services. In fact, both HostedToday and ResellersToday were planned at the same time. Most of our ResellersToday customers actually started out as HostedToday customers, but just needed someplace to expand. We've made it very easy to upgrade from 1 or more HostedToday accounts to a ResellersToday plan. Besides, once a customer has 5 or more hosting accounts, a ResellersToday reseller plan becomes a more economical choice. So instead of losing our customers who are growing to reseller hosting companies, we gave them a place to expand to.... ResellersToday. As for dedicated servers, we do offer them through ResellersToday. It is the next step for our resellers to take.... having their own dedicated server. That allows them more flexibility, and the ability to sell their own reseller plans to customers of their own. We do not have any plans to develop any more websites, nor do we plan on offering Windows hosting packages. Instead, we are focused mainly on growing HostedToday. ResellersToday will grow as a result, so needs very little marketing of it's own.

,b> What is the one thing that keeps you up at night?

I am constantly thinking of better ways to market ourselves. I know we have a good product and great customer support, but it is hard getting the word out to potential customers in this saturated market. There are a lot a good hosting companies out there, but there are also a lot of bad ones. Most times it's very hard to tell who's good and bad.... because there are very many good web designers out there building some very good web hosting business websites. But that doesn't mean they have a good business, a good business plan, or even any plan at all! So the thing that keeps me awake at night the most is thinking of better ways to get the word out that we have a great business and that just because we only charge $5/month, our services aren't "cheap" :)

What is the one thing that makes you jump out of bed in the morning?

Life! I have a beautiful wife, a 5 year old son and a 1 year old daughter.... and I love spending time with them :)

If you could look 3 years into the future, where would you like to see HostedToday?

As one of the leaders in the budget web hosting industry. We are continually gaining market share, and our growth rate is increasing. We don't plan on offering anything substantially different than we do today, as our offerings are already more than 95% of those searching for web hosting need anyways. We don't want to be "all things to all people". We want to be "all things to most people" and we feel that's where we're headed.

What phrase sums up your Marketing strategy and how are you trying to gain market share?

We have an aggressive marketing strategy in place for 2004. This strategy involves internet advertising, and getting our existing customers to promote our services for us.

Geographically(North America, Asia, Europe, etc.), what do you see as the biggest growth areas in the Budget Unix market and how do plan to capitalize on it?

We actually don't have a geographic focus, except that I realize most of our clients are based in North America (USA and Canada primarily). As we continue to grow we are relying more and more on our customer's recommending us to their friends and colleagues, and less on our own promotional efforts. So North America will likely remain our main source of business.... although we also have a growing customer base in the United Kingdom, Australia, India, Japan, France, Italy and Singapore as well.

How has your Engineering background helped you succeed in the world of Web Hositng?

I believe it's helped quite a bit. I was in the sales side of engineering, so I had lots of experience dealing with customers and accounts prior to getting into this industry. Customer service continues to be our main focus, and for that reason I continue to wear that hat myself :)

What new products or promotions do you have planned for 2004?

Although we are not launching any new products, we have launched an aggressive marketing campaign for the first quarter of 2004. Our basic hosting package will remain the same.... 500 mb hosting accounts with 5 gb bandwidth for $5/month, as that is all most people need. We just need to get more customers on board who can start to promote our brand for us. To help with this we plan on re-launching our affiliate program to give better incentives to those people and businesses who promote us. I feel this is key in growing our business.... getting our happy customers to promote HostedToday for us. After all, there's only so much a potential customer can learn from our website.

What is the biggest challenge in running a successful Hosting Company?

Managing the growth. It is one thing to manage a hosting company of a few hundred customers. It is quite another thing to manage tens of thousands of customers. Knowing when to expand services, backend systems, and when and what to outsource can be tough. Companies that are successful in this and who can grow and expand without customers experiencing too many bumps in the road will be more successful.