While a good number of the web hosts out there are pretty junky, it is getting increasingly harder for the good hosts to stand out from all of their competition.

For the web hosts who are here at Hosting Discussion, would advice could you offer to upstart web hosts that want to make a good and noticeable impression?

What does it take to truly make your hosting stand out in todays heavily competitive webhosting market?

If you optimize for some of the competitive and popular keywords for google top results, it will make difference, also there is need of branding of a hosting website to stand out from the crowd.

The one area that I've noticed a distinct lack in for many web hosts is their customer support. Some are good, don't get me wrong, but many just plain don't seem to care about you once they've got you signed up.

One could use forums to establish a presence. I'm not talking about paticipating like the average person does, but putting in a special kind of effort, really stick to a person's problem and helping him out, and thus "exposing" the knowledge expertise behind the company. Not a fast and easy way of doing things, but certainly one thing that can be done.

Try to target a niche and not compete generally with the large host. This will reduce competitions.

The webhosting industry, just like any service industry, is based on its customers. You need to build trust with them to even have the chance to standout against your immediate competition.

Targeting one specific niche is a good idea in some aspects, but you should be careful that you are not limiting yourself to the extent that clients are going to be so hard to find.

Like Chatterbox, I also feel that customer support is often lost among the majority of hosts. Making a better connection with the customer could make a particular host stand out.

targeted market and give profit to your clients that will make your market big

To stand out in any niche on the Internet, not just web hosting you’ll need to be unique. You can be unique by doing any other thing your competitors are not doing; you can’t stand out from the crowd of web hosts if you are all doing the same thing, if you truly want to do what it really takes to stand out as a web host on the internet, you’ll do what any business that wish to succeed as much as it wants, you’ll do things difference, one of the ways of doing this is selling to a niche, you don’t succeed in selling to a niche by just saying it, you’ll need to know what that niche is all about and how your web hosting can do one thing or the other the targets in the niche want. You may start with a niche and then extend to as many niches as you can handle. This is just one way.

All great points. Make sure you spend time defining your core value proposition. (support, technology, choice/selection, provisioning lead time, infratructure, automation) From that you can begin to brand your company and define marketing campaigns that speak specifically to multiple niche markets instead of building your business around only one niche. (web2.0/enterprise/saas/resellers, ect..) Good luck.