What are the losses of Web hosting customer base for the 1st month

Hi guys,
I was preparing some information for hosting companies and found that one of the real problem is that hosting companies are loosing lots of customers after the 1st and 2nd months of hosting rent.
It's because of lack of people read the content actually during few first days and even weeks.
It would be great if you can share some suggestions - how many percentages of users hosting company lose after the first months. 20%, 30% ?

Thanks!

 

I'd say we lose less than 1-2%. Most of those are biting off more than they can chew. They think they are going to have the next big forum, the next big web host, and they end up getting no forum users, no clients, etc., and after a couple months, they simply give up, realizing they can't keep paying the bills without clients/users.

 

WSWD, thanks for the answer.
Losses actually so small? Sounds to ideal. Or probably you have a lot of customers?
What about simple bloggers who started blog and in one month they understand they don't need it?
Because in general there are lots of simple people, but persons who wants to create something huge.

 

Most customers make their decision whether to stay with a hosting provider or not during the first 1-2 months.In case the support and the quality of service suit the user, they renew their hosting account for 6 months or more.

 

That's just an estimate. I could certainly look up the actual figures during the day tomorrow for the last few months and get a real percentage. But my estimate is likely to be very accurate. It just takes some extra digging to actually figure out how many left within the first two months. I don't believe I have any means of automating that.

We almost never lose a shared hosting client within the first two months. The losses we see are usually VPS clients or dedicated server clients. Like I said, they want to run the next big forum, or the next big webhost, and don't get any clients. Even so, they usually do last longer than a couple months.

On our SSD VPS product line (which we have offered for 7 months), the loss over the lifetime of the product is only 3.641%

Shared/Reseller hosting is 5.6% loss since 2010, which is when we started using WHMCS. I could go back further than that, but I would have to go through old records manually. 5.6% loss really isn't that bad for basically 3.5 years.

 

That is more interesting, thanks guys!
If you don't mine I would ask more questions.

I just talked with my colleague - what is the percentage of losses after a trial period?

And question from my research - what do you think, is it would be really interesting for hosting company to provide additional free service for customers which allows customers to get immediately 2 main things for new site:
1. readership
2. backlinks
and engage them to grow site?

I need to get these answers because of my marketing research to prepare relevant presentation materials. So, because of that your answers are so important.

 

I think you're missing the point of being a hosting company. It's not their job to help promote readership or backlinks and that shouldn't be their speciality. That's the sort of thing that SEO people do. You can't be an expert at everything and I'm always skeptical of hosts who offer SEO services as part of their package as it points to a very small host attempting to broaden their income rather than one attempting to provide great hosting service.

Can a host offer SEO services? Possibly, but I think it would work better being a separate brand, or in partnership with a reputable SEO company. Given the difficulty in producing genuine increases in quality readership/visitors (not simply just numbers, but ones that bring value to the business owner) I'd say that you're more likely to dissapoint a customer by providing these services and your percentage losses will increase enormously as a result.

If you're just providing hosting you can largely control your environment, the serivces being provided, and the result of using those services. You are giving the customer what they paid for and expect. If you start to add other things like SEO that level of control is gone and you cannot properly provide performance guarantees and are much more likely to underachieve the customers' expectations.

As WSWD points out, many new customers have unrealistic expectations thinking they will be the next Google or Facebook. If you provide just the hosting, and it works for the time they are with you, you haven't done anything wrong. If you're promising them business (which is how they will interpret your "readership and backlinks" service) then the failure of their site will be down to you...it will all be YOUR fault it didn't work. I'd rather not add that layer of grief when hosting is a very difficult business to operate at the best of times.

 

Thanks for comprehensive answer, I got the idea.
I'm doing research about opportunity to include plugin for Wordpress "in the box" for new sites of some hosting on Wordpress. I found that lots of other popular plugins such as Yoast, successfully did it and goes "in the box" at several hosts inside each new Wordpress website as not-activated plugin.
I'm curious how to repeat this success.
Do you have any ideas?

 

If you wont to Promote your plugin for wordpress, my suggestion is to let people know about when you can with out spamming them about it (obviously) But keep working on the plugin improving and refining it and let word of mouth do it for you is the best I think, might take a while though. You should have a website for your plugin to giving heaps of info about it including screen shots and even a video on how to use it and how it works. Also need to point out to people why its different to the rest and why they need it or at least should have it.

 

Hi Andy, thanks for your advice!
My experience of collaboration of forums shown that it's not a good idea to push the product in usual threads. We promote our plugin in other places and everything good. Here I'm really interested in opinions of professionals as you and other guys and appreciate all your answers.
But if you interested in updates from our side and how we are growing - feel free to ask it in private msg.