Simon O’Rourke - CEO and Founder of EIRCA Ltd Online hideout of Simon O’Rourke

Expanding in to new markets - always fun

When expanding in to a new market it is always an eye-opener to see how other sub-markets tick and indeed if they even tick at all.

At EIRCA we have three upcoming projects: The H-Sphere expansion, A project named Sanfire and one named This Is Hosting. This Is Hosting and the H-Sphere expansion are fairly straightforward. They involve markets where we have already spent three or four years so, one year hiatus from those markets aside, not much has changed. Sanfire is a different story and I’ll get to that later.

The H-Sphere expansion is going quite well, on our side, but it’s interesting to see what has happenned in our one year hiatus from the H-Sphere reseller hosting market. To me, it appears the market has gone somewhat stagnant; providers are letting customers come to them and there is really no projection from the hosting company that represents the market they are in. DIYHosting was, as far as we know, one of the top three H-Sphere reseller hosting providers, client base wise. My own theory is that what happenned after the DIYHosting sale made a few other providers sit back and rest on their laurels.

It was very unfortunate that post-sale, some providers spent around a month anonymously and maliciously blacklisting DIYHosting for their own personal gain. Over dramatising any problems DIYHosting had to gain that customer either through a web hosting directory posting or a bulletin board environment such as WebHostingTalk.com

I feel that once they were called out on that fact, they went back in to their shells. I personally found every post from another provider, directory or forum based, and called them out on their actions. The unfortunate thing is that after that customer grab, the other providers seemed to settle in and not go out and push the H-Sphere market. The H-Sphere markets biggest negative point is that the providers involved don’t seem to realise what a powerful tool they have at their disposal. Most of the advertising seen today, for H-Sphere, is by the control panel development company themselves (Positive Software). I am very much hoping that this will cease to be the case once our ads hit the scene. It would be really advantageous to the market on a whole if five or six providers came out “all guns blazing” and we undertook the same push as was evident in July 2005. Here’s hoping.

This Is Hosting is something of a challenge; it is to be a shared hosting brand that is on the higher end of the mid-range price scale. Based on the premise of a dual-platform multi-domain hosting, the brand will have a lot more work to do given the marketplace today.

The shared hosting market is truly flooded with overselling and underpricing in an attempt to gain clients. True, we could just follow suit and probably make a nice chunk of change with the brand but I am not inclined to put our companies in that position. Instead, even given the market, we’ll be taking this brand to the same level as our ex subsidiary, Interactive Hosting, which we successfully moved to the reseller platform almost three years ago. The shared hosting brand will have some familiar features, and some new ones. Most notably there will be a great new sitebuilder in the works. Site Dynamo looks like it really could fill a void and help us get re-established in the shared hosting market.

Sanfire is going to be the real eye-opener for us, and myself especially. Without giving away the farm, so to speak, we’ll be entering uncharted waters with this brand, come christmas 2006, and it should be a lot of fun. Having looked t the market that we’ll be going in to it is especially comforting to see that the market is barely even touched. As big as the market is, it still sits there with its audience unfulfulled. The market is something of a niche inside the online data storage market and involves Joe Public, which is always a fascinating environment to get in to. It’s great to do business with clients sometimes that are not industry veterans. Joe Public is a much better audience for unleashing new and exciting technologies and it’s even better to do it in person - just to see and hear them say “is that really possible?” Always fun.

Anyway, that’s my lot for today. Here in Nova Scotia we are getting the tail end of Hurricane Beryl and I thought I’d take time out of staring out of the window and saying “Darn, those raindrops look like golf balls” to write this little entry.