We held our first webinar this afternoon, looking at the subject of up-selling & cross-selling to your customers to increase revenue. At the end we held a Q&A and had some great questions. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to tackle all of them, so we are going to answer them now.
How easy is it to migrate hosting packages from multiple servers to a dedicated server?
Very easy if you have cPanel, but if you are buying a server we will often help with the migration. I’d give our sales guys a call on 0845 644 7750 and have a chat about how we can help.
Where does Heart Internet see itself in ten years from now?
If things keep going like they are, light years ahead and out of sight of any other reseller hosting company in terms of customers and technology and battling with a handful of hosts to be considered number 1 for shared hosting too.
Any advice on getting customers in the first place?
We have written a lot of blog posts covering this topic on our web hosting blog, some of which we have turned in to mini guides you can read here.
Are the presentation slides going to be available to download (PDF)?
You can download the slides as a PDF here. Please note, these are for reference only, we are not giving permission for these to be replicated or used elsewhere.
Can you recommend any books to better understand RHTML?
We don’t have any we would specifically recommend ourselves, however a quick search for “RHTML” on Amazon should get you started.
Do you think there is a big enough market for people having a reseller account, as there is so much competition out there!
The web hosting market is nowhere near the maturity stage yet, there are still plenty of brand new customers to gain for web hosts of all sizes. However it can be expensive to compete with multi-million pound companies so I would recommend identifying and targeting a profitable niche. Read more about that here.
Are there any tutorials on rebranding eXtend?
I’m afraid we don’t have any tutorials but it is very straight forward. You can do this through your RCC here.
Is there a chance you could offer resellers design & development services to your clients?
No, we are a web hosting company and have no plans to extend our services to web design.
What is SEO hosting?
It doesn’t really mean anything, although some web hosts have products called this. They pitch the product as being SEO friendly because the servers are supposed to load your pages superfast thus benefiting from the page load bonus Google has discussed in the past. It’s mainly just marketing spin.
Can you supply us details how to brand our emails similar to Heart Internets?
Our emails are simply HTML emails designed in house. We have created a set of HTML newsletter templates free for anyone to download and use you might find useful.
How easy is it to integrate HostPay fully within our CSS template?
It depends on your level of knowledge when it comes to web design. You might find these videos showing you how to set up HostPay useful.
Where can I find the SEO product add-on?
If you want to order it, this is in the ‘Add-ons’ section of your control panel.
Do you have any plans to provide an email marketing/ newsletter service as a few customers require this and it would be great to offer this as a cross sell?
None at the moment. Companies such as www.campaignmonitor.com already offer this and we would recommend checking them out.
Gutted I missed this.
Things broke at work and was unable to attend the seminar.
Sounds like there was a lot on.
Thanks for sharing this information.
This is the first I knew about this webinar: Shame I missed it
I have just heard this and thought that it was very good:
H.I are very good and the service you give is 100% tiptop BUT my biggest argument is: HOSTPAY, I have a few clients now (not sold through hostpay). BUT my hostpay site looks Rubbish.
I know that you are going to say that there are videos and help files BUT some of us are just sales people and it is very frustrating when you have all these great gadgets to use and I/we do not know how to implement them with the fear of messing up the site.
With all the strong competition out there would you buy from a site that looks like mine http://www.internetbutler.co.uk or a site that looks like yours built by experts? Its a no brainer really…….
What I wanted to do is intergrate it with my webdesign site http://www.bluemonkey.it BUT I have not got a clue how and It is so so frustrating, As I feel so so stupid putting in a ticket asking how to do this and that…when I ma sure it is so so simple
Rant over….
Davide
Davide,
I appreciate that things like this can be frustrating but there are a lot of our customers who have used the templates as a base to create their own look and feel. It is tough to give examples as many, for obvious reasons, don’t want our relationship to be public but Phil Matthews who runs http://www.impressioninternet.co.uk has been kind enough to agree to being used used as an example of how it is possible to successfully customise a HostPay template.
Matt
Matt,
Even though https://www.impressioninternet.co.uk/ is a good example, it’s pretty much the same as the stock template appart from some CSS changes, so anyone would be able to tell that they are on a HI platform.
Davide, your hostpay site isnt that bad and is certainly far from rubbish, but I and I think many people who use the reseller package totally understand what you are saying and how hard it is to move away from the standard templates.
Those who are coders/developers don’t really use hostpay but build their own platforms with third party frameworks on their dedicated servers, and thus, get the look and feel they wish.
For those of us who like to dabble, but aren’t amazing at this extensive coding or who simply don’t have huge amounts of development time to put into it, are finding hostpay a bit of a struggle. It’s a great way to generate extra revenue however, it needs a lot of work.
There are certain things that can be done to improve it through HI however, it must be bloody hard for them to develop such a platform.
If there was an easier way to theme, that would be awesome.
Anyhow, essay over.
G
Thank you for the reply Matt and thank you Phil for sharing your site (looks great):
Matt I understand 100% in what you are saying and I think that we will have to agree to disagree:
Phil has done a great job: But I am talking about people with little or no know-how who are trying to make it look as good but without the know-how they can not.
Davide