My question is, will Tucows be offering wholesale web hosting services to those resellers as well?
To be direct, that is the possibility that bothers me the most. A step in this direction could put a lot of negative pressure on facilities based web hosting providers, including our company, because Tucows can match our innovation ability, and that means so can the thousands of "marketing organizations" who then be reselling off them.
There goes our differentiation. And that's when I'd have to view Tucows
as a serious competitor, and no longer as a partner.
And of course, it would be smart for Tucows to take that step. I know if I were you, Elliot, I'd probably make the decision to do that. The facilities based providers who are now partners, and would then be competitors, most likely represent a very very small percentage of the revenue such a service would generate.
But that's all off somewhere on the horizon. For now, I can be content,
because I don't consider the email service to be too serious a
competitive service. But I know I must keep a wary eye toward the
double bovine corporation's future plans. *smile*
This issue has been raised a number of times over the years and I wanted to share our current thinking on this with you.
First, the Internet services (access, hosting, email, names) industry is changing, as it always does. We are now at a point where customers as a whole are simply less sophisticated and therefore more susceptible to marketing (for a good article on changes in the webhosting industry see http://thewhir.com/king/siluk-gregory021903.cfm).
Most people attribute GoDaddy's big numbers solely to price. I think it is direct marketing first, price second and poor competition from existing large retailers third. The more customers they generate, the more marketing they do (and so on). Believe me we are watching it closely. This is based upon empirical analysis, not simply speculation.
Let me give you the other side of this empirical coin. The smaller the service provider, the higher the renewal rate. This holds all the way down the line. So think about this a bit. Bigger providers are generating more new customers. Smaller providers are keeping customers more effectively. Implications abound. I will now go back to hosting and then return to this point.
We started with hosting so lets get back there. Hosting breaks neatly into two parts. Power, pipe and ping. Tools for site creation, search engine submission, etc.. The first part makes no sense to us as a service we would offer. It is not a complex business process that needs simplification. It is not about managing data. It is quite static.
As for tools, there are all kinds of opportunities here. We were talking in the office about site creation the other day on the heels of this data
(http://mediasavvy.com/archives000246.shtml#000246) and we agreed that site creation has not moved much in the last 5 years, which is consistant with the data in the link above. Front Page or Hot Dog in '97 are not orders of magnitude below where Trellix is today. They are points on a curve, not a shift in the curve.
This is a useful distinction in understanding our thinking as to services that we should and should not provide in general. There could be, depending on the tools, a hosted element to a site creation tool (because of, for example, the desirability of static vs dynamic content), but it also should be something that very, very few of you are currently offering yourselves.
It is always possible to do this yourself. I am sure someone will tell us how they could install zope, build templates, etc, etc.. You are all capable of this, but we live in an era of specialization. There are two things that you are not able to outsource easily. Customer acquisition and customer service. You can have tools to parse your logs, but only you can look at them and preform intelligent analysis. You can use tools around overture or google adwords, but only you can bring the local knowledge that might allow you to find a term that others are not thinking of that is relevant for YOUR business (geography, language, a specific service you offer......).
All big service providers are striving to become better at 1:1 marketing. There is an interesting irony here in that all of you are better able to do this. You are closer to your customers, closer to the edge of the network. If you have only 2,000 customers 1:1 marketing is just not that hard. In the course of a year you will interact with most of them and be able to do this almost implicitly (of course any decent CRM system, and I am thinking small here, will make you better at this). This should be a huge advantage. With some thought and planning and with a better understanding of the problem you are trying to solve, you guys could be the best 1:1 marketers in the world. Or you could spend your time feeding and burping a mail system (and I just use this as an example. I hope I have been clear that I understand outsourcing this is not for everyone).
Technical proficiency is only a differentiator if applied to the right problem and in my mind the biggest problem the overwhelming majority of you face is clear. Acquiring customers. Over time, because of the changing nature of the customer base, it will only get more difficult. We all used to live in a world of massive growth rates in new Internet users. Those days are gone. Word-of-mouth, still by far the most efficient and effective form of marketing, and the one you are all best at, is no longer sufficient. I don't have an easy answer to this problem, but my gut tells me it is the right question. And that is the tough part.
Since this is too long as it is I will stop here and let you guys masticate it.
Regards
Elliot Noss
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2003 3:38 PM To: Elliot Noss Cc: 'Discuss List' Subject: RE: Tucows E-mail Service
On Tue, 2003-02-18 at 09:51, Elliot Noss wrote:
I cannot comment on your service directly "domainwhiz" as youhave alwayschosen to maintain a high degree of anonymity
Yes, on public discussion lists I feel I must.
but I can tell you that(not bundling)
relatively few service providers (<10%) offer an email solution with
webmail, anti-virus, good anti-spam, IMAP, etc.. Those that do better be
maintaining a large base of mailboxes that they are sellingfor which they are getting paid or they are expending resources inefficiently.
I think it is a myth that such services are beyond the small shop.
There are numerous solutions out there for offering webmail, and any serious provider is using some form of virus scanning and spam identification tools. IMAP solutions are out there as well.
Using Postfix for SMTP and Courier for IMAP/POP, with a database back
end, Spam Assassin for spam identification, and amavis for antivirus, it
can all be done with open source tools, and provide a very simple means
to integrate it into any control panel application.
Our business clients can manage all of their company's email services via a web based interface because of this setup (all using open source tools, except the web interface which was built in-house). They can create accounts as needed, delete accounts, change account details, decide which (all,none, or individually) accounts can be accessed via webmail, etc.
And as an end user, I'd much rather deal with a company who is not outsourcing a service that has such direct and immediate interaction with the end user.
As Bill pointed out, without managing your own facilities, if a customer
has a problem, you have to depend on someone else, and on the
thoroughness of their initial investigation into a claimed problem, and
bring that back to your customer. No offense intended here at all, but
I can say that with out OpenSRS domain accounts, I've had to go back to
support more than twice on a few occasions because the first and even
second conclusion reached by support on a reported problem was not in
fact the problem. With a domain name, that is ok, because rarely does
it effect the operation of the domain name, because domains are a much
mroe static service than email.
But with email, this is a MUCH more dynamic service. If a user is not
getting email from a particular contact, I can do a quick log search and
identify ANYTHING in our systems that might have caused it, or tell the
customer definitively that email from that contact never touched our
systems. I can't do that with your outsourced solution.
As to the infrastructure....
When you can get server colocation with 500gigs of transfer for ~$100/mo
(or 1 Megabit burstable to 100 Megabit for roughly the same), providing
redundancy isn't that hard to do either. So even if the actual server
where they retrieve their email from goes down for whatever reason (or
the colocation facility where that server is housed goes offline), other
fallback hosts at other facilities continue to receive and queue email
for future delivery. And the database configurations are backed up to
these same backup servers regularly, so that in the event of a
protracted downtime, we can quickly, and virtually painlessly, bring up
a customer's service on another server.
Now, I deal almost exclusively with businesses with 50-300 users, and not really with non-business "consumer" email services. But when my customers (thankfully very rarely) call because something is not working, I damn well better be able to provide them an answer, and quickly! I can't do that unless I operate the facilities.
None of this was that hard to setup for someone with the base technical knowledge (I'm no genius in this field, even if I try to portray that I am through my manner).
That is why I say that your service would probably be more appealing to those who are more along the lines of "marketing organizations."
That doesn't mean I don't think your service will be successful. I think there are a lot of very successful marketing companies out there, reselling dialup internet and DSL as "Virtual ISPs", reselling web hosting services as "Virtual Web Hosts", reseller domain registrations without providing their own DNS services, etc. I think this companies have a place.
My point in my comments was that I highly doubt that those here who DO operate their own facilities will see much value add in reselling your outsourced email solution, assuming that they are knowledgeable admins or have one on staff.
But there are a plethora of resellers who run what I call "marketing organization" companies who will be quite happy to. These companies have their place.
The only thing I (slightly) bemoan is that now Tucows is making all of these companies a step closer to being competitive with us, by enabling those without the technical competence to do it themselves to still be able to offer similar services.
I don't come down on Tucows for doing that, it makes business sense, since I am sure a huge number of their resellers are not facilities based internet service providers. I'm sure this service, and similar ones, are much in demand by those resellers.
My question is, will Tucows be offering wholesale web hosting services to those resellers as well?
To be direct, that is the possibility that bothers me the most. A step in this direction could put a lot of negative pressure on facilities based web hosting providers, including our company, because Tucows can match our innovation ability, and that means so can the thousands of "marketing organizations" who then be reselling off them.
There goes our differentiation. And that's when I'd have to view Tucows
as a serious competitor, and no longer as a partner.
And of course, it would be smart for Tucows to take that step. I know if I were you, Elliot, I'd probably make the decision to do that. The facilities based providers who are now partners, and would then be competitors, most likely represent a very very small percentage of the revenue such a service would generate.
But that's all off somewhere on the horizon. For now, I can be content,
because I don't consider the email service to be too serious a
competitive service. But I know I must keep a wary eye toward the
double bovine corporation's future plans. *smile*
-- [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
