Google’s New Favorite Web Hosting Site
March 30, 2007
Is Google going crazy? The answer is probably “Yes” as far as the question concerns the results that the Search Engine displays on popular search term like “web hosting”. The number one listed website is Webhostingbluebook.com. This is a PR 7 rated “top web hosting” site hosted by GoDaddy’s “Wild West Domains” company.
Sorry to say that but I find this web site is absolutely useles because it is just another “top something” web hosting rank which doesn’t offer an objective criterion about web hosting. The surfers can see 10 web hosting companies listed on the home page. Every single of them is a shared hosting service provider. I don’t know whether the web site is connected to Bluehost but anyone can see two different advertisements which lead to this company.
The site states its “principles” on a web page titled “Ranking system” and they are nothing but poor. It says that listed web host must be “Affordable - Simply put, is it cheap”, “Reliable - Nothing less the than 99.9% uptime is excepted”, and to have “Storng Customer Service”. These three conditions are not explained and the ranking method used by the web site is not listed or hinted.
The web site has its own forum which has only 80 registered members. And there are no other good reasons a website like this to be ranked top on popular search terms in Google. The links that lead to the index page of the site are more than 11,000. Google however claims that they changed their rules and the number of inbound links to a given page is not a crucial for its place within the search results.
No one has a good reason why the Wikipedia’s web hosting page which is very informative and nonbiased appears five positions down than the Webhostingbluebook web site. And to be honest I can add that DawHB is definitely not the best web hosting blog worldwide. I see that many people find it very useful but it is doubtful why it should be ranked #1 in Google on keywords “web hosting blog”.
The only explanation I can offer is that the Google’s ranking system does not work good and it can be improved.
Running Up? Web Hosting Businesses Raise The Bids
March 4, 2007
After an year of mergers and acquisition the sale price of an average web hosting company has fallen down to 1.5 times the annual revenue. Many owners, especially those of the smaller companies sold their businesses. Do they lost?
Many entrepreneurs sold their web hosting companies in 2006. Some received good offers, some faced tough competition and decided to get fresh money and to exit the hosting market. Many of them are probably satisfied of the deals but many sold businesses with thousands of customers for less then the cost of luxury two bedroom apartment in any big American city.
The sale price of a given web hositng company has been undervalued within the whole 2006. The investors have been focused to buy customers at low cost but they have been reluctant to pay for brands. Most of them were existing web hosting companies or acted on behalf such companies.
One of the owners of a popular shared hosting providers has told me last June that the price his company pays to attract new customer has increased a lot. So he prefers to buy small hosting companies and to migrate their customers to his servers. “I’m not paying for servers and infrastructure. I don’t buy businesses, I need to get their customers”, he said when I asked him how does his company plans to grow its customer base.
I have to admit that this way of doing web hosting business works even it looks more like financial operation than as running an web host. But those who sell their customers loose all the time and money invested in hardware, technology and in branding their business. Many of them of course haven’t created value different from the customer base. Most smaller web hosts choose to use standart software applications and run their businesses using some of the popular web hosting management business platforms. That helps them easy to sell their clients when they want to, but prevents them to create strong brand and real business.
The lessons of 2006 however have been learned from those that decided not to sell their companies and from new web hosts. So you can see that more and more hosting providers are now focused to come out with anything that helps them to stand out from their competitors.
The main purpose of anyone who wants to increase the sell price its company would be to combine a few things. To calculate the costs of creating the brand, the postion and ranking in search engines, the value of the domain name, and to calculate prospectives. My advice is to sell only when you have a good plan for growth. Otherwise the investor will not agree to pay the best price, the one you want to get.
