More and more people are looking to own their own website, and that makes selling web hosting a great market to be in. It is already a big market and it is growing; most industries would kill to be in this situation.

However, as the idea of having your own website filters down beyond the intermediate to advanced web master, web hosts such as us (and yourself if you are a hosting reseller), need to start re-thinking the language we use. When talking to people who are looking to build their first website, or move on from a website builder to hand coded HTML & CSS, should we expect them to understand what a MySQL database is, and how important it is for their CMS? Should they need to? For example, I don’t understand how my mobile phone’s antenna connects to the telecoms network, and I don’t need to.

Traditionally, web hosts have circled this beginner market warily, unsure how to approach them, often leaving them to the specialist online website builder software companies. However, as the entry level market grows, traditional web hosts are moving to target them much more aggressively.

One of the trickiest interview questions I ask is “How would you describe web hosting to my gran?” It’s a tough question, and I’ve asked it to people who work in hosting companies and they have struggled too. One of the presumed holy grails in marketing web hosting is to find a phrase that can be used to replace “web hosting”. It is perceived to be clunky, boring and too technical. Rather than make the same presumption, we decided to find out.

To find out how many people actually know what “web hosting” is, we asked a sample of 1,000 people that constituted a good representation of the UK population (see below for the sampling bias) the question: “Do you know what web hosting is?” Before we ran the survey I anticipated a 80/20 split in favour of “No”. However, the results did surprise me a little. Of those who took part in the survey, 60.8% do not know what web hosting is.

Whilst a healthy 39% do know what web hosting is, that still leaves a huge 61% who do not. As an aside, another interesting stat that came out of the survey was a clear gender gap in knowledge.

What to do with this information?

If you are targeting the beginner market who don’t know what “web hosting” is (they just know they want a website), the challenge is to find the right language and selling points that appeal to this audience.

Using less technical language is important, with terms such as bandwidth, MySQL, POP3, 5GB web space etc. can be confusing and off putting. For example, instead of “5GB web space” use “Plenty of space for a small website” and instead of “Unlimited bandwidth” use “No limits on how many people can visit your website”

Additionally, finding the right balance between technical features and personal benefits is a challenge, and I would argue very few traditional web hosts have got this right yet.  Instead of listing how much web space and MySQL databases they get, focus on the tools they have to manage their website (e.g. the control panel) and added value features such as one click install WordPress. Also explain the benefits of having their own website, and all the things they could do with it (e.g. “Build a website, blog or shop”)

Not everyone has the knowledge to create or edit a HTML/ CSS template, and it is important that your product range reflects this. Website builder software gives anyone the tools they need to create a great website without touching any code.

People like to know they are dealing with people. Web hosting often comes across as faceless and generic. To help reduce the levels of perceived risk use quotes and screen shots of your existing customers’’ websites to show what is possible with your hosting.

Sampling bias