As someone who specializes in shared web hosting, I'm always trying to come up with more ways to gain new customers.
I already offer an incredible amount of features that come free of charge with all of my plans I offer. However, a lot of these features still cost me money that I don't put on to you (The customer).
With that said, I am interested to know what you guys would like to see in regards to what features and offers hosting companies provide?
I am doing a little study and most hosts these days already offer a lot of things such as:
Money Back Guarantee
Free Domains
Free Backups
Free Script Installers
Free SSL Certificates
et cetera.
So other than these items, what other offer or feature would compel you to order hosting with a certain company? Any new ideas?
Well, It's hard since you have to earn and pay off payments yourself.
if I was looking for an host, I would rather spend more for an good supported host then the ones that don't and also I look if they are real deal and aren't a scam.
Your customers won't mind speeding, It's what you can give them they they will stay with you. Support is one, 99.9 up-time is the other. So it's not about what free thing that you can offer
This is the biggest fight in the Web Hosting industry. I as well run a host, for a combined total of 6 years now.
Every host has its' struggles with "features" and the whole "uniqueness". Technology is just that, technology. Some hosts will come out with things before others, but eventually you have every host doing the same thing. Where does that put us all at then? Back in the original position of each host trying to become unique again. It's always an uphill battle.
I really think that the Shared Hosting, Reseller Hosting is slacking off since the last few years since everything is going mobile now days with all these new smart phones doing things that computers used to only be able to do.
Most hosts these days already provide free domains, free transfer, DDOS protection, support through tickets/live chat, free SSL (now that LetsEncrypt and COMODO offer free certs.), free backups. It's just the "normal" now. I'm as well interested to see what others expect of a host.
As Chris Grigg has said, most hosts offers similar features to their competitors so I think it is more important to building a reputation and brand than trying to offer all the features there is in the world. For me, features isn't a very important factor when choosing a host because I care much more about speed, uptime, security and support. It is not possible to find accurate data of this on their websites because of course all hosts will say they have the best speed, uptime and support but only people who are their customers will know so I mainly choose hosts based on reviews and uptime data available. This is where you can build reputation via customer reviews. Therefore, I think it is more important to focus on giving customers a good experience by providing very high quality hosting and this means they are more likely to make a positive review. This is tough though as people nearly always leave a review if they had a bad experience but not everyone shares good experiences.
In terms of features, maybe you should ask your customers what they want as everyone has different views. Maybe you could even have a poll on your main website (never seen that before).
@MasterA Puts on a good point. Competitors and new hosts almost always say "99.9% uptime!, FAST support!", etc. It's to pull you in for the sale. Only current and past clients know the truth. It's very important to keep your clients happy once you get them because in today's age, it's super easy and very quick to just board a train and hop on another server somewhere.
As MasterA said, clients are quick to leave a bad review, but you can almost never get someone to type up a positive review.
New hosts will have that quick support everyone likes. Why? Because the new hosts are eager to get those first few clients and when they do, they get a support ticket for something and they are constantly checking for alerts so their client doesn't wait. As the host gets some time in and a few more clients and more server work to do, they can start getting burned out doing all the work themselves but still not have enough revenue for a team to be hired. Which is why a lot of new start-up hosts crash after 1-6 months.
