I saw a piece of technology marketing earlier today, which clearly demonstrated the power of a well-written marketing message and how smart tech companies are at manipulating figures!
It was an advertisement for an Internet hosting company. It makes what ‘sounds’ like a very positive statement; regarding the quality of their service – until you think about what they are actually saying!
Here’s what their marketing message said:
“We guarantee that websites hosted on our servers, will be working 99% of the time!”
However, 99% reliability for an Internet hosting company is AWFUL!
The promise of your website being online 99% of the time, if you select them to host your website MIGHT sound like a great deal – but it’s not! It’s shockingly poor!
What they are ACTUALLY saying, is that if your business has it’s website hosted with them, you can expect it to be down, off-line and unavailable for the equivalent of THREE FULL WORKING DAYS EVERY 100 DAYS! So, over a period of little more than3 months, your potential clients or customers will be unable to find your website for a combined period of 24 hours – (that’s three working days, based on the 8 hour working day model).
There are 2 marketing lessons here
Lesson 1:
The power of a well-crafted marketing message is enormous. You can make something sound irresistible and inspire people to contact you and buy from you in their droves – even if your service actually sucks!
Lesson 2:
Even with great marketing, unless your service is excellent, you will lose clients just as quickly as you gain them – perhaps even faster! When I searched for that hosting company’s name on Google; it generated page after page of people complaining about the service they received. If only this company was as devoted to service, as it seems to be with its marketing, it would be massively more successful.
Marketing success in technology companies is just like everywhere else! It comes only when you are able to win AND retain high quality business. Looking after your clients and providing them with more than they expect, every step of the way, is not only great customer service; it’s extremely good business practice too!
It also stops people posting stuff like this!
You’re absolutely right. 99% uptime is pretty bad – Using a service like siteuptime – I am able to see that. My site averaged 99.526% uptime but that worked out to 89 outages in the year each over 5 minutes.
Here’s my 2 cents on this topic.
First of all, I have been involve in web hosting for over 10 years. By that I mean, not hosting people’s site on someone else’s servers, but my own. I know the ins and outs of doing this at a professional level.
Having said that, it is very difficult to guarantee excelent uptime for just pennies a day. To guarantee close to 100% uptime, you’d have to charge alot more than 99% of my current customers are willing to pay.. Where does that leave you?
I am by no means agreeing with the 99%, and making it sound like it’s very good. Most web hosts outsell by more than 1000%. How do you think a web host with 10000 customers can afford to give unlimited storage, and unlimited bandwidth for $5.99mo? COME ON PEOPLE! WAKE UP!
;)
My post was intended to showcase that the 99% uptime promise is meaningless. If you want a professional quality solution, go to a professional provider – not someone who sells crap and claims it’s gold dust. ANyone running a business on a $5.99 a month host has no place to complain – 99% is all they pay for.
Maybe with enough people realising that $5.99 equals crap, there will be a wider market for people like RackSpace, who charge close to $400 a month for a self-hosted solution here in the UK – but promise the 100% we all want.
Robert Scoble (who now works for Rack Space) told me that their servers went down on Monday BTW ;)
[...] fall for the “we promise 99% up-time” claims of low end web hosts. In web hosting, 99% is a very poor service. This actually means that they expect your site to be down for 1 full working day every month or [...]
[...] fall for the “we promise 99% up-time” claims of low end web hosts. In web hosting, 99% is a very poor service. This actually means that they expect your site to be down for 1 full working day every month or [...]