I think we may have outdone ourselves this holiday season.
Sure we have the amazing $5 deal running for shared hosting, and the $20 reseller plan (with rebates) is one of the best in the biz. We have celebrated Festivus with the Site5 community. Our corporate site’s halls are decked for the holidays… but something is missing. I know what we need! Go grab a cup of hot apple cider or egg nog or hot chocolate, cozy up to a fire or your computer monitor, and join us in a holiday carol.
One of my good friends, Jared Milos, took an old holiday classic and “tweaked” it a bit for Site5. While we could offer it via iTunes to make millions of dollars, we really wanted to share the Site5 spirit with the citizens of the internets. Without further ado, we give you the first Site5 Hosting Carol!
A Site5 Hosting Carol
Site5’s hosting all your websites
While you’re out shoveling the snow
We’ll be online, so go replace the lights
That burned out twelve months ago.
Everybody knows it’s crazy in the holidays
We’re just trying to be nice.
You’ll be searching a parking lot maze
As we keep an eye on your site.
You know that hosting can be lame…
So we do everything we can to make it change
Site5’s the best host that you can find
So you can choose us and have peace of mind.
And now we’re offering you this cheesy song
Since we are fun and goofy too.
Other hosts can’t compete as Site5 sends along
Happy Hosting to you! (yeah…)
If you would like to download the song and spread it virally like… a virus… You can get it HERE (Right-Click, Save As…).
Nothing I could possibly say could top the hilarity of that song, so I will just stop right here.
by Kevin Hazard, December 20th, 2006 | No Comments
It is already the middle of December. As this time of year approaches, you can be sure of a few things: you can expect to go through a few tanks of gas looking for a parking spot at the mall, you can expect to see 24+ hour marathons of It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, and Miracle on 34th Street, and you will be seeing several “Best of 2006″ and “2006 Year-in-Review” articles cropping up around the internets. In order to truly bring 2006 to a close, we wanted to give you a glimpse of what Site5 has done this calendar year. This list is not exhaustive, but it will be exhausting for me to drag together, so please excuse any tangents that I use to keep myself entertained.
Speaking of tangents, according to a Bonus Features clip on the Family Guy Vol. 4 DVD, the Family Guy writers work hard to find good tangents or “cut-aways” where characters say something to the effect of “This is worse than that time when…” to interject some kind of archaic or esoteric reference.
Speaking of esoteric references… wait… how about I just get to the Site5 Year In Review…
January
The University of Texas won the Rose Bowl and BCS National Championship. This event had nothing to do with Site5, but a lot of my family went to University of Texas at Austin, so it is worth mentioning. Synco was released, replacing BillAdmin — the billing program Matt pieced together in 1999 when Site5 came on the scene.
February
The Site5 Engineering Team was hard at work squashing the bugs we were finding in Synco, and Backstage was being released. In February, Site5 sponsored a PhillyOnRails meeting, and Adam made a cameo at the meeting with some Site5 swag.
March
The name of the game in March was Oregon Trail. That masterfully crafted work of blog genius served as a formal introduction to the initial features of the Backstage control panel.
March also saw the “disposal” of one of our old, dead servers.
April
April saw the arrival and departure of Site5 2.0 site. We never really stick with site designs for too long, but the Web 2.0-feel of the redesigned site was abandoned with special quickness when we saw how ineffective it was at actually providing relevant information in an easy-to-understand manner. For a trip down memory lane, check out the Baby Blue version of the site that preceded the whitespace version. I wish I had a screenshot of the whitespace version… as I recall, it was very 2.0 trendy.
May
We had several operations-based improvements in May. Among them, we were splitting servers to ensure the best quality hosting environment, and we spiced up our plans to stay hip with the times. From a blog-author’s point of view, May was a month for the record books. Some of my favorite highlights from May’s blog posts include: “We’re makin’ moves like we’re wearing parachute pants and sequin-encrusted jackets,” “I bet you didn’t hear a thing… We came; we sidled; we made a few changes; and we vanished like carbs from the Atkins diet,” and “Sadly, it would appear that many other people in the Blogosphere have proven that I am about as original as the guy who just ran up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art humming the Rocky theme song.”
June
June was a slow month on the Site5 blog circuit. We only had one post, and no one was able to identify the mystery picture for me. The engineering team began rolling out Squire to all of our servers. This new system dynamically linked all of our servers for monitoring and automated service purposes. We continue to add functionality to Squire in order to provide the ultimate hosting experience.
July
We moved our support system from an aging Cerberus software package to a cleaner, easier-to-use Kayako installation. The transition period was quite a pain, but we are extremely pleased with how well Kayako meets our needs. On the blog front, we published a 3-part series on Web Hosting Basics, from a definition of web hosting to a “How to find the right host” article.
August
To conclude the Web Hosting Basics series, we posted an in-depth guide to creating an account with Site5. If you click through to that link, you can see a few screenshots of yet another Site5 corporate site design.
September
September saw the return of MultiSite hosting after a brief hiatus. According to the good ol’ blog archive links, we did not publish any blogs during the month of September, but it was merely the calm before the storm of traffic from October.
October
If you haven’t read the Top Ten List for choosing Site5, you are missing out. You should go and read it right now… Twice… Actually, you should probably memorize it so you can quote it at parties. I have recited it from memories at parties, and after everyone’s laughter subsided and the “you are the biggest nerd I know” jeers stopped, I’m sure everyone really appreciated the awesomeness and hilarity of that post. The biggest word of the month: FLASHBACK! We got worldwide attention as we completed Flashback and compared it to a DeLorean and one of Apple’s OS features. In other news, Google acquiring YouTube for a whole heck of a lot of money.
November
Election Day, Black Friday, Mystery Boxes, and Bugaloo Shrimp made appearances at Site5 in November. Our $5 plan got Dugg, and subsequently turned into a Web Host’s Nightmare.
December
More of the same ballyhoo. We’ve already celebrated Festivus with the Site5 community, and we might add a bit of flair to the site by the end of the year. Our support times have been incredible, and our ticket queue load has been extremely low… This means people don’t need our help with their site (which is a good thing) or they are getting quick, quality responses (which is another good thing). Oh… And we have a Holiday Song. Needless to say, we are extremely excited to see what the new year has to bring.
What To Expect in January 2007
We’re taking over the world… Or at least North America… Not by force, not by prowess, but through an epic quest. The details are being worked out right now, but I guarantee that it will be fun. Keep your eyes on the prize (this blog).
by Rod Armstrong, December 7th, 2006 | No Comments
Reputation is important, especially for businesses and services.
Doubly so for Internet-based services (like Web Hosting), where literally thousands of hungry competitors are just a Google search away.
Keeping your reputation stellar is a fairly epic battle that gets exponentially tougher the bigger and more successful you become. Even when your business machine is well-oiled, running smoothly and you are pretty darn good at keeping just about everyone happy all of the time, it’s still very likely that something, somewhere can and will go wrong. And heaven forbid that many things go wrong in many different places.
When some obstacle eventually does come forth: whether your customer satisfaction levels start to drop off, you get a bad write-up in a magazine, or a lovely blogger singles you out as the devil, the most immediate tendency is to fly directly into Full-On State of Emergency mode.
This isn’t a bad thing. After all, years of positive reputation building can go down the drain with just a few negative blemishes. Negative word of mouth spreads ten times faster than positive. (I’m not sure if this is true exactly, but it sounds right.) Immediate response to the issue is critical. However, in this day and age, the first instinct to such a seemingly dire situation is often this: what do I say in response? How do I keep [whatever negative message] from spreading? How do I play damage control? How do I spin, manipulate, counteract, defend, attack, save face, foil, act the fool, et al.?
This indeed seems like a reasonable first instinct because this is often what we see from the big, established players. This is almost always their first response strategy to some type of public problem. Not to mention that we see the same from politicians, governments, media outlets, celebrities.
So it might go without saying at this point, but Internet businesses don’t need to behave like giant corporations or celebrities. Unless you have dedicated PR people at your disposal (and well, even if you do), your first reaction to a possible Reputation Crisis shouldn’t be how you can spin your way out of it. It should be how you can fix it. If the bruise is public, you may even feel hurt and defensive. Keep an open mind towards criticism. When your first instinct is to defend your honor to the death, there may certainly be a valid suggestion hidden under even the most inflammatory and idiotic of critiques.
Save your resources for the problem itself, may that ever-curious Public Eye be damned.
Reflect. Listen to your own clients and employees. Try to find the root cause of the issue, and fix it quickly before it becomes worse. And don’t talk about it. Except with your own customers, that is. They deserve the disclosure about how and why things are improving, and they will probably, hopefully, have your back even more when your reputation is again put to the test. Effectively and healthily dealing with a critical situation can speak volumes more than a little exaggerated bad gossip once everything is said and done.
You found Site5. By some twist of fate in this mixed up internet world, you are reading our corporate blog when there are more than 100 million other sites on the internet. You may live in Australia, Austria, or Austin, but the simple fact is that somehow you heard of Site5 (and Kevin’s amazing blog posts), and you are here. This information is not earth-shattering, but it gives way to an extremely interesting statistic: If you found us recently, we probably didn’t have to pay anything to get you here.
We are coming off of our most successful month in Site5 history, and we have paid next-to-nothing in advertising in the past six months. Our biggest “advertising” expenses are affiliate commissions for converted sales, and we pay 1/5 what our competitors do for each sale. Something must be wrong with the system. This doesn’t make sense. Wait… Maybe it does.
What’s the Deal with Affiliates?
You might be surprised to learn that in the hosting industry, it is common practice to pay affiliates well over $100 for each new customer they refer. No, that’s not a mistake, and no, that statement needs no qualification. You put up an affiliate link for a web host, a customer signs up for a $10/month hosting account, and you get paid $100. Some quick math would reveal that a $100 payout on a $10/month account is 10 months of service that the host is not getting paid for. These affiliate commissions are clearly built upon an assumption of long-term commitment, but the $20 gross revenue that host gets in the first year (which breaks down to $1.67/mo) would explain why Site5’s plans are so affordable. Note: That $20 gross revenue is likely to decrease significantly when you break out blanket advertising expenses for the year to your hosting revenues, further proving my point.
Site5 pays a small fraction of that typical cost for each affiliate sale, but we can pay off that affiliate expense anywhere from one to four months into the hosting contract. Let’s say we give an affiliate $20/sale. If that sale is on our $20 reseller deal, we gross $220 on that account ($20/mo x 12 mo - $20 payout) in the first year. If that sale is on a $5 shared plan, we gross $40 on that account in the first year. Both of those numbers are greater than our competitors’ $20/account gross, so we would then have more money per account to spend on servers and support… you know, those relatively significant little things.
If you are looking for hosting and you stumble across Site5, we hope that one of our plans and your website needs go together like lamb and tuna fish (thanks to Big Daddy for that comparison). Maybe it has to do with our prices, our specials, or our ruggedly handsome and witty blog writers, but our affiliate conversion ratios are among the highest in the industry. Go ahead, navigate to our site to sign up for our affiliate program and test out that claim. We are currently using iDevAffiliate for our affiliate system, but our entire affiliate program is being overhauled by Matt and David, so you may not get too much experience in iDevAffiliate before our new system drops.
The new system will be integrated directly into Backstage, and it will be designed with an easy-to-use interface. As an affiliate, you will be able to easily set up ads, track sales and get payouts via paypal or have balances applied directly to your hosting account. Because we are tying the system into our customers’ account management panels, every Site5 customer can easily become an affiliate and take advantage of the opportunity to make a few dollars by simply dropping a “This Site Is Hosted By Site5″ link or image at the bottom of their page. When the new system is released, we will probably increase payout levels on a tiered system (the more sales you get, the higher the commission you get per sale). Before you crack your knuckles and prepare to call us out on our diatribe against high affiliate payouts, we are not going to get up to the $100 mark, but because you need a Site5 account to use the Backstage system, we feel a lot better about sharing the wealth with our customers (slash affiliates).
Not coincidentally, Site5’s most successful campaign has been the “Tell Your Friends” Multisite deal simply because our community is our most valuable resource when it comes to marketing and promoting our services. Extending a discount to new customers is essentially writing off the discount to advertising expense. All of the decisions we make for the future of the affiliate program will be with the understanding of the dollars and cents of the hosting accounts (as I discussed above) as well as the common good of the Site5 community… We’ll make Web Hosting Communism work: I’ll be “Karl Heinrich Marx,” Matt will go by “Mao Tse-tung,” you can call Todd “Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov,” Adam will respond to “Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili,” and Rod’s can be reached as “Leon Davidovich Trotsky.”
But You’re So “Cheap”
As I mentioned in the recent post about overselling, we do everything in our power to ensure a top quality hosting experience, and our plan pricing is derived from a Keep It Simple Stupid approach. People say we are overloading our servers because our plan prices are so low, but as I explained, a greater percentage of our monthly fee is spent on the quality servers and support you are getting with us rather than the advertising expense you are helping some other company pay.
Rather than relying on large affiliate payouts–not to mention other costly advertising campaigns–to bring in new business, we spend the money providing additional value. And since our offerings are second to none, people who find out about Site5 choose us much more frequently than they do many of our competitors. So in that sense, even our affiliates win, because although we’re not paying triple digit dollar amounts for each referral, the people they send are much more likely to host with Site5 because of the bang-to-buck yield. So the next time you see an ad for a hosting company–whether it be a sponsored Google search result for the keyword “web hosting” (which goes for up to $40/click,.. don’t even ask me about factoring that amount into the equation), a banner on a cluttered hosting directory or a “top 10″ site–know that Site5’s conspicuous absence is our way of saying “Hey, come check out our hosting. We think you’ll like it.” Actually, I’m from Texas, so for the country music fans out there, I can make it a little more clear: “We say it best when we say nothing at all.”
We have been cutting out all expenses that do not make our service better. The result? We have strengthened our hosting infrastructure, improved support policies, implemented new quality assurance systems, and invested in technologies that will ensure the best customer experience possible.
The engineering team began rolling out Squire to all of our servers. This new system dynamically linked all of our servers for monitoring and automated service purposes. We continue to add functionality to Squire in order to provide the ultimate hosting experience.
