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A woman is just a woman, but a cigar is a smoke

        -- “The Betrothed”


Rudyard Kipling’s 19th century poem, for all its political incorrectness, centered on the choice between product stability and product enhancement – his wife of many years or the harem of Havanas that beckoned. Fast forward to the Internet age where web hosting is web hosting, a server is just a server. A lot of companies offer disk space, bandwidth, and the other usual suspects of a web presence: reliability, redundancy, support. So, what’s the digital cigar and what smoke will it yield? Value-added services, bolt-on products, and other tools that enhance the hosting experience, helping customers grow and profit.

Last analogy – in and of itself, hosting is the hood of the Internet business engine. What’s underneath yours? The answer will explain if your business gets where you want it to or if it sputters on the shoulders of the Internet, consigned to a space in the dot-com junkyard. That’s why hosting has evolved from disk space and bandwidth to a series of base plans where users can add features as needed and at will.

AIT approached 2004 as the year of innovation. Fresh off the success of introducing its IMHIP hosting platform in 2003, the new year centered less on technological breakthrough and more on building value into hosting plans. One reason for that is the changing face of the customer: while the Internet remains vastly underused, particularly by small business, it has reached a saturation point among the tech savvy. The new generation of customer is the one who doesn’t know or care how the back end of web site works, but is very aware of its value.

AIT's digital toolkit has grown to include items that address a variety of issues, from security to marketing to spam to customer communication. For instance, what’s more annoying than spam? It is also costly; Nucleus Research of Massachusetts reports that unwanted e-mail costs businesses about $2,000 per employee per year, and that’s just in lost man-hours:

• Spammers have been documented as stealing other site's domain names via email forgery.
• Spammers will sell someone a mailing list and tell them that the people on it want advertising e-mail.
• Spammers will embed viruses and applications to exploit your mail and computers

AIT developed an anti-spam service to cut down on the clutter and to do it in a way that lets companies and individuals design their own rule sets so that expected mail won’t be blocked along with the junk. It’s a server-side product that does not require additional hardware or software, and has proven popular with customers.

An equally pressing concern for customers is security. Barely a day goes by that you don’t hear about a new virus or worm being unleashed on unsuspecting computer networks. The bigger a company is, the more inviting a target it makes. AIT hosts more than 190,000 and the company’s founders are ex-Army who have made physical and data security a focal point of the business. Those two points put an especially large bulls-eye on the AIT server farm. While the company has multiple mechanisms in place to ward off intrusion, we felt it necessary to go another level deep and did it with two things: a server monitoring service and server firewalls.

The firewall option is for Linux servers only, for now. It represents that additional layer of protection that customers with sensitive applications or data need. The monitoring service is a means of improving resource management, particularly for AIT's reseller channel. Even though AIT's hosting options feature some of the most robust disk space and data transfer in the industry, resellers may find themselves with customers who are not concerned about resource usage. A single resource hog can slow down a machine for the other customers who are on it, and the over-consumption of http, ftp, and mail has a cost.

Security and a good spam filter mean peace of mind; what about growing a business? With more than 62-million addresses on the Internet, the desire to rise above the clutter is a key concern for any web-preneur. Between the domestic economic rebound and activity abroad, the Internet continues becoming the global marketplace. So, customers are looking for more than a web presence, they want ways of announcing that presence.

AIT has also developed an e-mail marketing mechanism through which customers can make use of mailing lists, publish newsletters, and otherwise promote their products and services to existing customers or to web site visitors. The ability to create, send, and track HTML messages is becoming increasingly important, a bit ironic as concern about and anger with spam heats up. Of course, there is a difference between unwanted mail and what the direct marketing industry calls targeted e-mail.

E-mail marketing allows for personalization of messages on a scale no other medium can approach. It gives the sender total brand control, ensures that pricing and product information is accurate, and allows for full leveraging of information databases. Best use ultimately depends on the individual user’s goals: small companies may want little more than the ability to send a newsletter with tips and other information, and perhaps a price special. The enterprise user is more likely to have a brand and message that must remain consistent with broader marketing efforts. A retail company can craft specific product messages and target them to individuals most likely to be interested based on information collected about the buying habits of customers.

Coupled with the AIT Form Builder, a user can perform intelligence gathering. The Form Builder service is a means of finding out what customers want through polls and surveys, a tool for generating contact lists, and another method of putting forth a company’s unique identity. It stores records for easy call-up, making it the ideal companion to the E-mail Marketing service.

Product developments like these are the result of trying to answer the most difficult of questions – what do customers really want? As easy as it sounds, no one has a pat answer; if one existed, far fewer companies would go out of business. The most effective means of getting on the right track is to ask the question. Customers are an infinite source of insight and wisdom, particularly for a hosting company. If only one of them suggests that you begin offering a particular service, take it for what it’s worth. When one-third, one-half, or more of your customers want the same thing, the right answer is to give it to them. Is your service provider doing that for you?

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