What is Niche Hosting?

The webhosting industry comprises mostly of SMEs. For them huge investments in marketing may not be the best solution. Yet, there are many webhost who have grown from a reseller hosting system to a few thousand servers within no time. And interestingly none of the hosts we studied were actually selling cheap. They all focused on the right target markets. They create a niche market for themselves.

One webhost focussed only on resellers and called it private label reseller programs. They gave out more diskspace and bandwidth and charged a higher value. Their benefits – lesser customers, higher cash turnover and lesser support requests as the resellers looked after their own customers. Another webhost focussed on webmasters only. Webmasters generally have more than one site. Hosting is not their prime business and they want an affordable solution. Also, as most webmasters are tech savvy what they needed more than regular support is a community where they can interact with various other webmasters. Needless to say that these hosting companies did grow fast.

One approach webhosts can take is to focus on certain services of hosting only. Such as email only hosting. This would be useful for people for whom email is very critical. They may prefer to have the emails on another server which is exclusively for emails only. So even their main site goes down, they’ll still receive their mails. Another good example could be backup hosting only. Here the webhost would backup the entire data of a website on regular intervals.