More important than cost and far more important than features, the relationship you have with your web hosting provider is key to your success.
Website Magazine asked iPage.com's Justin Reynolds, the hosting provider's Brand Marketing Manager, several questions about how buyers should evaluate hosting vendors, the marketing and development trends that are shaping the hosting industry, and where iPage is investing for their future success.
JR: The last couple of years have been interesting, that's for sure! The rise of social media has actually altered the definition of online success. All in all, success is no longer based on the performance of an individual's website, but on their use of the internet as a whole. Businesses need to maintain a high level of "useful relevance" to customers-and need to stay on top of emerging trends to do that.
In the old days, also known as a year ago, more site impressions lead to increased revenue. Now, online businesses need to be on Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp- they need to be creative, consistent and transparent about their businesses with customers when engaging public forums.
We've also been intentional about utilizing and engaging in social media platforms as a means of communicating with customers. It's helped our customers, but it's also helped us to quickly identify needs and trends and discover growing segments in the market.
As a web hosting provider, we really want to help customers utilize the amazing array of Open Source apps that are constantly becoming available. To do that, we offer Simple Script which maintains the latest versions of leading open source applications, installs them for customers, sets up the associated databases, provisions software and security updates quickly. It essentially puts cutting-edge software into the hands of the novice user.
Of course, all of the new technologies and customer touch points have resulted in potential security issues, and we've had to adjust our infrastructure and customer services to ensure the best protections possible.