I'm building a data hosting company with a vision for exceeding any one customer's exceptions. Besides fanatical support and decent hardware, what are some great ideas to make my hosting company attractive to serious buyers?<p>For example, should I offer a bigger range of features (Mobile Server Management, 24 Hour Live Support etc.) or should I focus entirely on simplifying the process of getting one's website online fast? I want to go from Good to Great.
Find someone (ideally, someone who has never even heard of HN) who is dissatisfied with the business results they get from their current hosting. Ask them why they are dissatisfied with those results and how much money it cost them. Ask them if they would pay 1/10th of that money for hosting which does not have those problems.<p>If the answer is yes, find four more people like that. If the answer is no, thank them for their time, forget the conversation happened, and talk to someone else.<p>If you go haring off into feature-land you'll find that nobody who cares about Mobile Server Management will pay you money for web hosting. The ones who need it won't trust their businesses to you. The ones who don't need it but like the idea of the feature have no money to spend but feel like they have all sorts of useful feedback about webhosting, including why they should have dedicated server performance with the responsiveness of their own engineering and ops team for no more than $4 a month. The people who urgently need better hosting will probably not even understand what that feature means, because it includes at least two works of tech gibberish.<p>P.S. Before you try selling a new hosting solution to anyone try selling a currently existing solution. If you can't do that, you have no hope of selling a new solution. You can learn this without spending six figures in hardware and engineering costs to build a new solution.
The best hosting experiences I've had are with Linode, AWS and Rackspace. Linode for their brilliant custom control panel - a key differentiator between them and those running stock control panels. Rackspace for the support - if I need to speak to someone, someone will pick up the phone in 2 rings or answer a ticket in 15 minutes. AWS for the fine grained pricing and ability to scale up and down at will.<p>All of the above are leading or close to leading in their respective niche areas. Their innovations and key differentiators appeal to different types of customer, product and price range, neither which you have stated. It is difficult to give advice on this basis, are we advising how to innovate $x/month bargain hosting or $xx,xxx/month enterprise solutions?<p>I think you have to identify these clearly before proceeding.
I can think of two companies that have made web hosting innovative, and they've gone in totally different directions -> Amazon (AWS) and Heroku. Both solve very different problems, very well. So I guess the question is, who is your target market, and what is their problem? Also, check out prgmr.com - to me his motto 'We don't assume you are stupid.' solves my problem (having to deal with hosting companies that assume I am stupid).