January 29th, 2007 |

Isabel Wang had a very interesting post today about Six Apart’s integration with Windows Vista and how they want every company to have a blog.  Isabel went on to ask whether hosted service providers should expect customers to adjust their thinking to be in line with the service provider’s or the other way around.

I believe that service providers offering hosted services need to take a big step back and look at what their customers and potential customers want.  Customers who have become accustomed to “standard” terminology and service packaging in the industry would probably be satisfied with the status quo.  But service providers don’t want to just exchange customers back and forth, do they?

In order to be understandable and relevant to the potential customers currently sitting on the sidelines, service providers are going to have to start marketing their services in ways that make sense to those customers.  Isabel said “the average consumer probably doesn’t know how to install scripts.”  Some of you may be thinking that you have a “simple” script installer.  Really?  They may seem simple to you but I would venture to say that a large number of people would still find them confusing.

Why do people like services like Flickr?  Because they do what they want them to do (in this case, host photos) and they do it simply and easily.  Is Flickr (part of Yahoo) a hosting company?  In the traditional sense of the term, no.  But you may have noticed that we’ve started using the term “hosted services” instead of “hosting” here on the HostingCon website.  Why?  Because there are many different facets to hosted services today.  Website hosting, hosted messaging, hosted VOIP, hosted applications and more are now considered “hosting.”

Our conference program for HostingCon 2007 is going to talk pretty heavily about the new face of “hosting.”  Expect a lot of discussions about new services that hosted service providers are offering.