Making Your Hosting Plan Work For You

Web hosting today is highly commoditized - there is little to differentiate between any two popular brands in the market. Most web hosting companies today offer a shared hosting server that comes integrated with a CPanel. Then, there is a VPS plan, a dedicated server plan, and custom hosting solutions for the Enterprise. 

For most part, this works. But each business is unique and has its own needs. So what is an absolute necessity for one business may be a frill for another. 

In the past decade, there have been a lot of attempts towards building unique web hosting solutions. Companies like WPEngine have carved a niche with the “managed WordPress hosting” solution - there are tons of businesses that run on WordPress and they do not want the hassle of troubleshooting bugs. 

Then, there are service providers like Wix, PageCloud and Squarespace - these are the DIY website builder tools. I spoke to one entrepreneur - Rob Evans from Graviteq who runs his company website on Wix. According to him, picking a website builder application, instead of a regular hosting provider, has helped his company dramatically bring down the costs and resources necessary to maintain a website.

Rob is not alone. A growing number of small business owners have been moving away from traditional hosting providers to DIY hosting services in order to save costs and improve productivity. 

But what about large businesses that can afford to spend on IT resources? Here too, there is a growing need for customized hosting solutions. We are not simply talking about Enterprise solutions. Instead, it is about the need for plug and play solutions that brings down the time and effort needed to get going.

Take the example of a business offering coworking spaces to their clients. Such businesses have unique requirements like the need to offer high bandwidth services like video conferencing, VoIP calling, business hosting services, meeting room booking, etc. to their clients.

Now these services can be provided with third party video conferencing and VoIP applications or be self-hosted into the company server. Self-hosting provides the coworking company with branding opportunities that do not exist with third party and is a reason why many organizations prefer this. 

While regular dedicated server plans can work for a need like this, it requires a lot of work that is frankly operational in nature. Coworking businesses looking to set up an infrastructure like this might choose to instead opt for hosting solutions that offer these integrations on a plug-and-play model. 

Such a solution is also highly profitable from a hosting provider’s perspective. Clients like coworking are high value clients that need tons of bandwidth and resources. By building custom  solutions that they can work with, they can productize a business that is highly commoditized in nature.

There are a lot of such solutions that regular businesses need for their everyday operations. For example, any organization offering customer service might need a cobrowsing solution that allows them to hop on to their customers’ screen to help fix issues they are facing. Similarly, any business with a significant online presence would need live chat or social media tools for their marketing. Hosting providers who make it possible to seamlessly integrate these solutions to their client’s websites are likely to attract a large number of such clients.

Traditional web hosting plans are passe. While individuals and small businesses are gradually moving towards website builder applications, larger businesses today seek solutions that are easy to plug and play. If you are hosting company, it is time to move away from commoditized plans and instead work on offering solutions that improve productivity and reduce bandwidth for clients. This is where hosting will move in the coming decade.