"But it’s also highly commoditized: hosts can’t differentiate their products very much, there’s effectively no barrier to entry, switching at any time is fairly cheap and easy, and most customers buy primarily on price."
I don't agree at all that for many website hosting customers the process is "easy".
A typical web hosting customer is not tech saavy they either have it being handled by their "tech guy" or they can't even remember how their files got onto the server in the first place with their static site and sometimes they don't even know who is hosting their site [1].
[1] Source: We're a registrar and we get the calls and emails of confused customers who have no clue where they are hosted. They don't even know enough to look at the whois and see the dns to give them a hint. Actually you'd be suprised how many times someone will access our whois and think we are their registrar.
Couldn't agree more. The way you host and manage a static website hasn't really changed for more than a decade, and most hosting UI's feel like something out of the 90ies.
Both by giving people an instant way to get their site online, but also by making it dead easy to do typical tasks like adding Analytics or getting forms to work.
Couldn't agree more. The way you host and manage a static website hasn't really changed for more than a decade, and most hosting UI's feel like something out of the 90ies.
I think this is partly because of providers like godaddy who have massive up-sell attempts and navigation misdirection to confuse people into purchasing all their value-add services when all you wanted was to purchase a domain or use their DNS services. It's the rare provider who just wants to do one thing well rather than be horizontally integrated and do a bunch of things half-assed. Unfortunately, people prefer one-stop shopping, but the integration doesn't make it easy to differentiate the offerings as services that don't need to be provided by a single provider. Like you can use godaddy as a registrar, but the ability to not use godaddy as the DNS provider too is buried and hidden. They purposely conflate what can be two separate services.
EDIT: I do remember canceling some godaddy service at one time and the process was super easy. Called and said I want to cancel service, wait time on the phone was low, and there was no questions asked.
I don't know if I'd go out of my way to blame their horrible panel on upsell attempts, or confusion. I think they honestly hide most advanced features away because they don't want to invite an extra 50,000 phonecalls a day.
The less trouble a user can cause, the better -- particularly at that scale. For more advanced users it merely invites frustration, however.
You may be right... I'm not willing to login to godaddy right now (have to dig up credentials), but their marketing materials on the unloggedin site are much improved over how I remember (six or eight months ago?). The services are differentiated better and the value-adds for each service are actually related to that service (rather than the aggressive cross-pollination of service offerings).
So far updates are done by just dragging the whole folder unto the site dashboard again. We'll figure out what files have changes and just upload those.
There's also a version history so people can always roll back changes or see how the site looked like before.
Don't take this the wrong way but $5/month for a single static site is crazy expensive. I understand wanting to have a sustainable business but for $5 you should give customers 20-30 sites IMO.
Yeah, I have to disagree. Hosting a static site costs the provider practically nothing. Apache or Nginx can chew through requests for static content like it's nothing. $5 is prohibitively expensive because static sites are often one-off projects that you don't want to have to worry about. If I'm paying $5 for each one then I would worry about it.
You don't just get a static site though. We handle all the whole build process: minifying, bundling, image optimization, giving each asset a unique content based URL and pushing them all to Akamai.
BitBalloon also makes forms work without having to do any brackens programming (or fitting in an external form service and try to get it to look like part of your site).
There's lots more timesavers included as well, so if your time is with anything to you, those $60 for a year of hosting will pay for themselves.
A friend of mine asked me today for an easy way to get a website going for his wife's beauty salon. I recommended him to bitballoon.com after learning about it here. It looks very slick and easy to use. Thanks.
I don't agree at all that for many website hosting customers the process is "easy".
A typical web hosting customer is not tech saavy they either have it being handled by their "tech guy" or they can't even remember how their files got onto the server in the first place with their static site and sometimes they don't even know who is hosting their site [1].
[1] Source: We're a registrar and we get the calls and emails of confused customers who have no clue where they are hosted. They don't even know enough to look at the whois and see the dns to give them a hint. Actually you'd be suprised how many times someone will access our whois and think we are their registrar.