www.sitehoster.co.uk

[SiteHoster]

Hello

I'm self taught and this is only the second real website I've built....

Its a bit ugly...but I like ugly lol

Your thoughts welcome

Cheers
SiteHoster

[Ian J]

I only looked at two pages (home page and compare plans) and they were both too fussy for my liking.

It is generally accepted that you only have a few seconds to catch the eye of the surfer and if you fail to convince him quickly that yours is the site that he should buy from he will be off to the next.

I'm no design guru so can't tell you what you should be doing but two thirds of the text on the index page is devoted to "Why Choose Us" and apart from "We use a state-of-the-art data centre" I didn't understand a word of the rest and it may have been written in Double Dutch for all it meant to me.

I don't know what your target market is but I am a finance broker and have eight small websites and buy the equavent of your "Star" packages. If you are trying to appeal to people like me you will have to write your site in language that we will understand and only use bullet points that are important to us as I haven't a clue whether my host runs on Redhat, Bluehat or even Greenhat

I have been out and about buying a car this week and your huge "compare plans" list reminds me of a similar list that I was looking at comparing the fixtures on two different trim levels of the same car but my guess is that whilst most people would be happy to pour over lengthy lists to make sure that they bought the model with all of the features that they required they wouldn't be bothered to do the same with their website hosting.

Perhaps this could be done over two pages with the main page just having the "leather upholstery" "CD multiplayer" "air conditioning" and metallic paint" with a secondary page for those that want to delve deeper into the gear ratios and plug firing orders.

[TWD-Tony]

Being the same business (hosting) I am going to offer you some advice - please do not take these words the wrong way, I am only trying to help you....
Firstly - Get a designer to do your site, if you are serious about your business then you need to spend some cash on creating the right impression.
Secondly - DO NOT offer unlimited space & Bandwidth... Can you back up those UNLIMTED claims? I have lots of dedicated servers both in the USA and the UK - can I backup all those servers to your PROSTAR plan? (It does say UNLIMTED space). Or can Peter put this site and it's forums on the same plan with it's large bandwidth requirements for £1-85 / week.
In reality UNLIMTED does not exist in the hosting industry - and it gives the whole industry a bad name when people advertise these things.
You also do not say on your website if your server(s) are located in the UK or the USA or somewhere else????? - After a bit of digging I have found your server(s) or at least the server that your website is on is located in the UK, this is a good thing and somthing that you should be advertising not hiding...

[SiteHoster]

Hi Ian

Thanks for the input, I've taken what you said on board and plan some changes.

SiteHoster

[SiteHoster]

Hi Tony

Thanks for your advice

Unlimited

You've probably guessed I'm a reseller, I too posed the same question to my up line hoster, here's what they had to say:

Unlimited features as standard.

A lot of customers write to us and ask "Your products look too good to be true, do you really offer unlimited webspace and data transfer?". The answer is Yes, we have included some more details below to explain how we operate these features.

Unlimited Data Transfer

Unlimited data transfer is included with a number of our web hosting accounts, we are able to offer this as we closely manage our network resources. We do not allow certain types of websites to use our services, these are:-

Adult content orientated websites.
File distribution websites e.g. a website distributing large movies, software or MP3's.
Hosting banners, graphics or cgi scripts for other websites.
Storing pages, files or data as a repository for other websites.
Reselling or giving away web space under a domain, sub domain or directory.

Our customers are hosting genuine business or home web sites and we have substantial capacity in our network to manage this. We can upgrade our data transfer with our providers within 24 hours should we need to.

Unlimited Webspace

We operate a sophisticated web hosting platform that utilise large network disk arrays. If we need to add more webspace we can do this with no downtime by adding more disks to the arrays. As there are multiple arrays any one can fail and another one automatically takes over, as all data is synchronised there is no impact to any web sites or email hosted with us. This dual system also allows us to carry out more complex upgrades by taking down any array and working on this while the another array continues to serve our customers.

We are commonly asked "If you run out of webspace will the web server be offline when you add more space?" The answer is no, there will be no interruption to your service.

All we ask is that files stored on your account are linked to or related to your website."

So as long as my customers abide by my Terms & Conditions it's unlimited in my book. I do hear there is much debate about the subject within the industry, but I'm happy to call it unlimited for now.

So the site looks thats rubbish does it? lol The more feedback I'm getting the more I'm inclined to agree, time for a rethink.

Thanks to everyone for their input.

SH

[TWD-Tony]

I'm sorry but the term "unlimited" is just wrong IMHO.
It IS limited in that if you try and use to much of your "unlimited" resources then your account is cancelled!
They offer unlimited bandwidth because they know that the average website used less than 1Gb per month anyway... You may also find that the port speed is capped so that the bandwidth is limited by speed and not by physical amount.
Like I said above - can I backup say.... 12 x 80Gb HD's to your unlimted plan? Should we try Lets not waste our time, it cannot and will not happen.
Your "upstream" provider is spinning you a line - unless they get their servers and connectivity from the land of the fairies. I would hate to see you get a big customer and then find your account shut down for using to much resources...
I did do a quick search on who you were reselling for - choose your business partners wisely is all I will say... There is over 1000 domains hosted on the same server as you... Overselling - I think so!

I'm NOT trying to put you down, i'm not a horrible git like that and I don't slag off "competators" to get an advantage - i am REALLY trying to do you favour and point out some of the pitfalls of what you are doing, reseller hosts come and go very quickly, some get bored, some have their prices so low that they have to provide support for more clients than they can handle just to make a profit - and eventually fold...I don't want you to think that hosting is as easy as getting a reseller account and a paypal account - it isn't...

[mitov]

hi,

just to comment that the dude on your homepage under the why us bit looks like hes broken his leg...LOL!

Miro

[SiteHoster]

Well Tony we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one

Are you still offering the 0870 numbers?

SH

[SiteHoster]

lol Miro

Actuall he's just a touch camp

SH

[ConceptNetwork]

Tony - much of what you say is spot on, but it was written above that the T&Cs stipulate that the files on the server must relate to the site being hosted, so no you wouldn't be able to back up your files.

It's very true though that unlimited just doesn't mean what the average person would think. Your bandwidth is unlimited in that they won't cap it, but it's limited in terms of the physical bandwidth available to you. Do a google on 'slashdot effect', 'digg effect' and 'DDoS'. Post just a single image on your site that gets picked up by one of the popular news sites (such as slashdot or digg) and you'll find that the many thousands of requests hitting the server result in an unintentional DDoS attack. Your site just won't function any more as the sheer number of incoming requests swamp it. Even a text-based forum such as this requires special hosting to cope with demand.

If your customers are going to be average business customers without special hosting demands then there's no need to emphasise the 'unlimited' part. I'd be surprised if they knew what bandwidth was!

My main concers with your site are...

The colour scheme. It's a little too high-contrast for me.
The 'special offers' box is half way off the top of the page in FireFox.
Your section titles are very jaggy. You need to apply anti-aliasing to the text.
The 'contact us' link unexpectedly fires up my email program. Make it a feedback form instead. Just about everyone has an email program installed as default, but not everyone uses it. It's also bad form to cause an unexpected result. If a new window is to open or program to launch, make sure the user expects it.

Other than that the site is fine and I wish you well. You're enterting a very crowded market, so go read all the info on the forum and on the main Teneric site to do with marketing. It may be the thing that puts you above the crowd!