Adding New Services and Products to Your Hosting Company

Overview:
We all know that web hosting is a very saturated market; there are no surprises in that. How do you increase your companies profit without with out changing your main service offered? Simply add secondary services to your existing company.

The best part about most, if not all, these secondary services is that you don’t have to do much except collect more income at the end of the month. The reason is that many secondary services can be affiliate and reseller type programs that are invisible to your customers.

In this article I’ll cover some of the extra services you might have been considering adding to your business or maybe you haven’t yet and are trying to see what you can offer to increase your profits.

Domain Names
Domains and hosting go hand in hand. If you haven’t already, consider adding domain name services to your business. Registration, transfers and renewals are the easiest which you can offer by your own private label with companies such as eNom, TuCows, DomainPeople and others.

Website Templates
Since you already have a huge gold mine of clients who have websites why not offer them the ability to quickly and easily buy their own website templates? No you don’t have to design each template yourself or even hire a designer, sign up for the affiliate program at TemplateMonster.com and earn XYZ % per sale.

Template Customization/Design Services/Template Installation
Now that your customer has this fancy new template they might not have a clue how to integrate their existing website into it. Offer a template integration/installation service based on how many pages they have and how complex their site is. They may want the template customized, another potential area of income.

Search Engine Optimization
Most businesses think the search engine will magically find their website once they get a URL and put a few pages online but they’re completely wrong. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an art and takes skill and practice to be good at it. If you can’t get your own sites to rank highly then do not offer this service to others.

Search Engine Submission
Charge a fee to submit their address to the top search engines and other related local directories. Submit your site to 10000 search engines offers do not work. You need to get them listed in Google, Yahoo, Dmoz and a few other big boys or girls =)

Site Builder Tools
A feature that seems to be gaining much more popularity is the ability to have customers build their websites through your own online site builder tool. They can select from a bunch of pre made templates for page layouts, graphics and more. Don’t include this cost in your regular monthly service, charge extra for it. Some companies offering site builder tools include SW-Soft (The guys at Plesk), ETC ETC

Script Installation Services
Since most website owners don't have a clue what they're doing, why not offer custom a pre-selected script installation services for clients for applications such as, Shopping Carts, Message Boards and other scripts clients need installed. Keep in mind that some scripts may not be compatible with your server.

Improved Email
Many businesses and individuals have a website for mostly email and less for their actual website reasons. Offer spam and virus scanning for them or even better, backup/failover systems in the event one server is down, they can still have access to their important email – at a cost of course. For clients email is more important than having their own website online. Most people are more familiar with email than updating their own website. This service area goes often overlooked by hosting providers.

Uptime Monitoring Alerts
Why not give your client their own special uptime report card page for an additional fee? Monitor their URL, mail, ftp, etc. Send them reports of their sites uptime and notify them if there is any kind of downtime.

The possibilities are endless when it comes to being creative and coming up with new service ideas. These are by no means a complete list but just a few ideas to get you thinking.

About the Author:
Steven Leggett is the editor of the server resource and hosting tutorial site, www.webhostgear.com – the hosting resource for professionals. A division of Wave Point Media Inc. www.wavepointmedia.com