For you who run web hosting business, do you do take time and effort to beat your competitors, or do you not really care about that and instead concentrate on running your business as well as you can?

Some competitors you will not be able to beat because of the advertising costs involved (unless your budget is higher than theirs).

So the best thing to do is just focus on the quality of your business and make your customers happy.

That positive word-of-mouth from happy customers is worth 10 times of the advertising you would normally pay for.

I do pay attention to the competition, simply because much of today's market is price driven. I don't believe in offering unlimited space and bandwidth though, and then trying to cya in the TOS.

The best plan of action is to focus on what you do well, and take care of your customers.

Yes that is what I would do at least for initial stage for my business. Also I will concentrate on local clients and to provide the best service.

I watch our competitors on a regular basis, but I look at realistic competitors. I do not consider GoDaddy or HostGator to be a competitor. They're in a different market than the market we're after, but I do watch what they're up to anyway

I wouldn't say I "try to beat them" per say, more like try to learn from them as much as possible.

You can learn alot from your competitors. Besides, the internet is way to big to be worrying about what's cooking in your neighbors kitchen, or if your dish will taste better.

Just worry about providing your clients with quality service and support, and you will be fine.

As I am Currently rebuilding I don't want much at all, But What I do have to say is I try to out perform other host, not in price but in quality, uptime, support, and customer happiness. My Prices or what I will offer is what others have to beat not me.

I think it's good to keep an eye on your competitors, but if all you ever do is try to beat then maybe you should focus some of that energy into building customer relatioships, higher quality, etc. so that you aren't just the lower price.

It is very important to be realistic in the web business world, no matter what web services or products you are going to sell to your customers. For example, it might not be a possible idea trying to outperform some of the companies having hundreds of thousands of customers but if you take a look at some long trail terms which tell what real buyers are after, you can make better and profitable websites.

That's a good way to look at things, I like it. Just because Go Daddy and Hostgator are popular extensively promoted doesn't mean everybody will register his domain on Go Daddy and host their website on Hostgator's server.

Focus on what your doing and not on the others, their business is their business, we all have different ideas, plans and motives

Regards

Like the others have said, the most important thing is your business and keeping your customers happy. Other hosts don't matter, we all have differences in our services, pricing and approach to the hosting business. It's best to concentrate on that rather than worrying about competition.

Ya I agree with that point. what you do is totally differs from others.you can do best as much you are innovative.Just learn from others and their mistakes and do what you do without those mistakes.

Competitors are the best indicator for our company, we always conduct several marketing intelligent stuff to get and understand what customer really wants, because in our company CUSTOMER is always a KING