This year (2007) web site hosting experienced a shift in the mindset of many web hosting companies away from aggressively trying to one-up the competition in meaningless package increases and instead decided to focus on their customer service for their clientele – Thank Goodness! We saw first hand and received reports from areas around the world that those companies who had been focusing on their service standards started to overtake new client acquisition ratios which had traditionally belonged to the aggressive marketing companies. Most of this change was due to increased consumer referrals based on the confidence of the services they were referring their friends, family and colleagues to.

Client referrals increasing lately has put pressure on the high flying web hosting market acquisition companies to rethink their approach in the growth of their business and to push toward enhancing their current customers’ satisfaction and loyalty. This shift caused a ripple effect amongst most of the industry leaders which prompted an enormous investment (estimates of hundreds of million of dollars) into support services; software, hardware, provider relationships and human resources. Naturally with investments of this size there were a good amount of press releases to ensure details of these investments were circulated to the web hosting industry news centers and through them to potential new customers.

The biggest part of this story that I can see is the human element, the web hosting customers who were able to force information about the companies they liked and those they disliked which helped to spawn this referral momentum. It seems through reading through the forums and blogs that web hosting customers are not only becoming more savvy in terms of finding information on the companies that they should do business with but they also have become far more intelligent about the specifics of what they need for their web site hosting and how to search for those companies who can best support them.

Increases in information resources have helped to make the web hosting customer more savvy. Blogs for instance have become one of the fastest growing types of web sites and consumers want to research what are the best blog software options available on the market. Wordpress, B2Evolution and Joomla all have extensive information on their capabilities, demo accounts and true unbiased user reviews all available online so that any novice blogger can easily find information on what are their best choices.

This distribution of information on the different aspects of web site hosting and what benefits you might be able to receive from one company compared to another company has enabled web users to research before they buy creating a far less messy experience and one which helps the web user get to where they are going faster and has alleviated the stress of the web hosting company from trying to support more and more web hosting users who may have made some bad choices due to a lack of information. Fortunately now that the information is out there it will remain there and hopefully website hosting users will use that information in the future to continue to make better choices and force the web hosting businesses into this new (hopefully) era of better practices.

Peace & Happiness to everyone, have a great 08!
-Eloise Beall, International Research Director

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