Eircom Gets Serious About Web Hosting?
Many of the business bills sent out by Eircom this month have an advertising brochure included. The brochure, the current edition is the Autumn 2006, is the first bit of joined up thinking from Eircom’s marketing department in a long time. The days of the Eircom rat are well gone and it seems that Eircom wants to get back in the business. The key areas of interest to the Irish hosting business are the domains and hosting offers.
The prices on domains are on page 13. Billed as “eircom’s great domain name sale”, they are not exactly groundbreaking prices. The .com is being pitched at 10 Euros a year. The .eu is priced at 20 Euros a year. (Eircom.net is a .eu registrar so it pays 10 Euros per .eu to EURid.) The .ie is priced at 67 Euros per year. All three are bundled at a price of 85 Euros per year. How long this “sale” will last is not known. However Eircom will have to maintain or even lower these prices to maintain marketshare.
One of the strangest inclusions in the brochure is this:
“Want to develop a website?
eircom can develop a professional website tailored to your needs. Call us for advice”
Does this mean that Eircom is getting into web development too? Other ISPs have done so in the past and Esat has its own web development section that is actually more successful than its hosting section.
The data hosting pitch in Eircom’s brochure is weak on facts. It is targeted at businesses so it pitches three products: managed e-mail services; managed web services and online server backup. The Managed E-mail service is priced at 6.50 Euros per user per month. With Google making moves in the same marketspace this is a bit overpriced.
The managed webservice is low priced at 8.99 Euros per month but the quality of the package is even lower than the yellow pack hosting offers that are common in the Irish hosting market. The diskspace is only 250 MBs and it includes a .com domain. However trying to order any hosting product on the Eircom.ie website shows that Eircom has a long way to go to get back into the market - the site design is banjaxed.
Hosting, especially shared hosting and domain name registration is almost an impulse purchase now. It has become totally commoditised The market has moved on since Eircom topped the Irish hosting business. People generally do not want to ring up or be contacted about hosting after filling in a form. They want to be able to order the product and get it - immediately. They don’t want some click and drool flash advert insults potential purchasers.
Perhaps it may not have occurred to the Eircom marketing people that those in business tend to do research and probably have an understanding of hosting and domains. Eircom commits the cardinal sin of sales - it makes it difficult to purchase anything.
Eircom’s mistake is one that the Hosting Service Providers (HSPs) like Hosting365, Novara and Blacknight do not make. Ordering hosting and domains is easy - the HSPs made it easy and that’s why they have more marketshare than the ISPs. Perhaps Eircom should have their marketing department try to purchase Eircom domain and hosting products online to see what they are missing.
Tags: Irishblogs,eircom, Domains, Webhosting, Internet Statistics, Irish Webhosters, domainnames
Written by John McCormac on November 1st, 2006 with comments disabled.
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