It’s become abundantly clear to me within the last 6 months or so that what people value most about our website hosting is that it is “managed”.
Sure, they are happy to know that it’s fast and has all these features, but at the end of the day, they don’t really care about that. They just want someone to take care of it for them.
Maybe that doesn’t seem like a great insight to others, but right now it’s a big deal.
I have been a bit shocked to hear that, when offered a faster service for a bit more money, almost none of my clients have been interested at all.
They just don’t care.
What they want is for someone to handle all of this for them.
And I do! I do a good job, too, so they tend to stick around.
And while some are price-conscious, most are not. As long as it’s reasonable and we are doing a good job, they are happy to pay it.
Because they see the value.
Most have been in business a while and probably remember what it was like to work with non-managed hosting. That fear of being totally lost and having to sit on the phone with support drives them to work with us.
And I’m only just this moment realizing that I probably should try to control people’s domains, too. I’ve had some clients lately whose sites went down due to things within their hosting account that I could have easily dealt with.
So going forward, I should recommend that they transfer their domains to me.
I could even charge a premium for “managed domain registration”.
I don’t think much more needs to happen right now. I just need to always keep in mind why people work with me.
It’s not the speed. It’s not the features.
It’s our service.
This actually is a really important insight, and I’ve kept it in mind. It really is the selling point.
Also, I have actually started providing “managed domain name registration” where I control the domain and manage everything myself to make sure it gets renewed. And people are happy to pay considerably more for it.
Some are coming from Network Solutions which charges nearly as much anyway, so they aren’t paying THAT much more by comparison, but it’s still interesting that it’s so worth it to them not to have to worry about it.
People are, in fact, stoked about the managed domain name renewal.
Additionally, we’ve finally started selling a “Total WordPress Maintenance” package which basically handles everything. I’ve switched one client to it and they seem very happy. I’m hoping to ramp things up and get tons of people on there going forward.