Hosting Reputation Management – You Get What You Pay For
Friday, March 05, 2010 at 10:53 am by Chuck Swanson
Here at Opus Interactive, we field requests for hosting needs all the time. It’s what we do, and we pride ourselves on providing a customer experience that is second to none. Downtime is unacceptable and our clients rarely experience it. To accomplish that, our solutions are comprised of only the best technology that the industry has to offer – not an inexpensive proposition.
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We recently had a prospect ask us to quote a solution involving dedicated servers, custom firewalls, 99.99% uptime (we gave him a 100% SLA), 320 GB of storage, SQL server, and numerous other add-ons. When he saw the quote he was alarmed to find that it was higher than he had estimated. He immediately found a cheaper alternative and we congratulated him and wished him well. He may be back. He may not. He may not even understand what he’s buying.
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If I walk blindly into a dark car showroom and ask to buy a car, am I alarmed at the salesperson who tells me the cost is $32,000? Am I delighted when I walk into another dark car showroom and the salesperson tells me the cost is $12,000? There’s a clear need for lower cost solutions – I get it, but you need to clearly understand what you’re buying.
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A crash in a $12,000 car may likely hurt more than one in the more expensive model, and obviously the features and quality are at lower standards. Likewise, a server crash can hurt a lot more if the hosting is second rate. We could have lowered our price a little, and we often do for the right opportunity, but one of my colleagues used to say, “We never lose money on a deal we don’t win.” We stand by our solutions and always will.
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I’m sure many managed services providers can relate to this. In fact almost any reputable business can empathize with this scenario. To those I say… stick to your guns. Your reputation for quality products and services is likely what you built your company on.
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