Feedback please? UK hosting deal....

Hi Folks,

A long time ago (nearly 2 years) my company had rackspace, bandwidth and a collection of our own servers, together with several customer colo machines in our rack.

For various reasons at that point we exited the market, handed over our web hosting to a friendly company whom we now use for all our hosting (and are still very pleased with) and handed our few colo customers to another friendly company, with whom we still have one box.

So.. we got out of hosting. I have not regretted it once since whatsoever. It made sense to quit at the time, and I am still glad we did. End of story....

Or possibly not....

I'm actually thinking we might possibly get back in the hosting market, albeit in a reasonably specialised way. Please bear in mind this is UK hosting, so I'm really after UK feedback (but any comments are appreciated!).

I think I may have spotted a niche and the accompanying gap in the market and want to run a deal we might be able to do if we do get back into hosting past the folks here :-

£50+vat a month ( = £58.75)

Will gets you :-

* Your own dedicated server (not a virtual one - a real box)
* Running a linux/bsd distie of your choice (there'll be a selection)
* 250GB HDD
* 512MB RAM
* VIA 1.3GHz CPU (maybe higher)
* Your own /29 block of IPs, meaning you're segregated from other customers on the network. This gives you 8 IPs, of which one is gateway, one is network, one is broadcast, so 5 usable IP addresses.
* 50GB a month data transfer
* Remote power cycler access so you can perform hard reboots for yourself

I guess its aim would be at the 'more technically able' end of the spectrum. There will be usage restrictions, like no illegal content, maybe no IRC (maybe)...

I am also not sure about setup charges. At the moment we are thinking probably no. Also not sure about minimum term. Again it's possible we will go with a "no" and see how it goes. We anticipate retaining customers by being good -- not by nasty terms and conditions! Payment would be on card via Worldpay.

Any feedback would be greatly received.

AJ

First thought is 50Gb transfer seems pretty low for a dedicated box.

Also I guess you are competing with the $100 american options? Are there that many people that will specifically want a UK server, not one in US?

I agree with R2D2, 50GB seems a little low. However, I think the concept is good on targeting those in the UK. When I eventually get a server I was thinking of looking at those companies in the UK just in case anything went wrong and I had to contact them through phone. Obviously ringing the US would be expensive.

Although the package doesnt seem bad (apart from the bandwidth), it wouldn't fit someone like me who doesn't have a clue about managing servers. Perhaps this could affect a lot of people and therefore narrow down your target audience?

For the UK, 50GB isn't too bad - compare them to other providers like UK2Net (who're probably cheaper now I've posted this:P)

Thanks for all the feedback so far.

To answer a few points in no particular order :-

* I think UK2 are quite likely cheaper. But I've heard people say "uk2? I'm not using them!"... I think their reputation is a bit weak.

* There are people in the UK who do value UK based hosting - obviously it's 100ms closer than USA for one thing, and that does make a difference to response times.

* Realistically do many people really use more than 50GB?

I think we could offer 75GB or 100GB and it would barely make any difference to peoples' average usages. I would guess most hosting companies quote MASSIVE limits, which are (mostly) massively underused.

* We could install the free WebMin software for server admin (for people not quite so confident)... Obviously a basic understanding of terminology would still be necessary though, or a preparedness to learn a little bit of linux admin.

Final point, I'd say these servers are really aimed at techies who want to run, say, a fairly high traffic website, or a few medium sized sites, or an offsite nameserver or mail relay, or just a server to backup to.. Or a machine to do development on.... Or whatever.

Somebody in the office actually suggested these machines would make ideal 'offsite spare' servers for people with an existing 'fat' server or servers...

A.

If your service levels are of a decent level, then I'm sure you'll do well. The company I work for uses UK2, and yep, they utterly suck. We'll be moving over to another provider when time allows us to (probably Fasthost, I think).

I had a server from Managed.com - 1000GB a month, and I used about 45GB :) I'm now on a shared plan with Site5 and saving myself over $100/month.

I think your pricing, for solid, supported (?) servers in the UK, is spot on. Good luck :)

MarkB, many thanks for your feedback.

My guess is that some techies would be actually 'put off' by a potentially gimmicky looking 1000GB limit! So what we'll probably do is create an FAQ that says 50GB is notional, and just not to take the mickey with usage ;o)

Re: Supported... We were thinking of being quite specific about this.. Basically our plan is to buy hardware in fairly large batches - probably eight or sixteen machines at a time. This means we will be able to offer :-

* guaranteed hardware replacement if it actually does fail
* a huge uniformity over hardware - and we will build the boxes ourselves from components so we'll know the hardware inside out.

We don't realllly plan on offering too much in the way of OS or software support - we'd assumed that our clients would be fairly tech savvy themselves, and @ £50 a month, there isn't enough margin to allow the expending of massive amounts of staff time on support. That said, we would do our best. We'd also planned to make a very decent members only support base explaining for each distro how to setup basic things like mail service, DNS and so forth.

As I've said, servers could be remote powercycled by customers themselves, so that aspect of support would be covered.

Finally one last thing, our bandwidth would be BGPd from two suppliers, with dual redundant routers... Switches would be managed ones (i.e. nice decent HP ones)... So hopefully from a "network support" point of view not much would be necessary, as it'd be pretty damn reliable.. Of course there'd be a good monitoring system to keep an eye, and probably a 24x7 ....

.. Yeh... Ideally if you could perhaps give me some rough idea of what level of support would you be expecting inclusive ??? That'd be really useful.

Thanks again.

A.

Don't really have much to add considering what's been said already. I agree with Mark - the pricing seems fine. However, you only mentioned a single price point. A lot of marketing stuff I've read recommends offering a selection of entry price points. People will then shift around to suit their needs. Perhaps something to think about.

When it comes to hosting, support seems to be the TOP priority. If a customer thinks there's something wrong with their server, they're going to want answers within a couple of minutes. I think this is a good selling point when targeting the UK though. As Mike says, many people feel more confident they'll get a quick reply if the hosting company isn't on the other side of the world - true or not.

You might also like to think about setting up a support forum. My two hosts have these forums and they're a real asset. The users help each other out too, which takes pressure off support.

Expect marketing costs to be high.