I personally think that the best place to advertise a hosting company is on webmaster forums and word of mouth. I see that as the best because you are getting out to the people that are going to need hosting, so it works in your favor.

Have you had any experience with advertising on forums? If so, would you care to share which ones have worked for you?

I have found word of mouth generally produces long term clients.

Word of mouth definitely works for me. I do frequents a few forums and it draws some customers as well. Truthfully, I think ranking high on the search engines would yield the most responses as far as new customers. I'm not ranking high on search engines, but, we are working on that.

Good service and support will really multiply your clients. Get them in, keep them happy and any advertising you do will create the word of mouth and your money will be well spent.

i am sure that forums help. I think one to one advertsing helps here. A visitor posts his requirements ...an hosting company replies to his requests and engages him into a discussion and inturn gets a new client. Well thats how I had got my hosting a year back for my site

anyone do link trading? find it works?

I would prefer to select few loyal customers and reward them by offering gift hamper or something that can motivate them to bring customers, by referring others.

i agree with you posting on forums will help abit! but only get you so far. as for me im looking in to seo not so easy as people say it is...

For sure, Web Hosting Talk and Hosting Discussion have helped more than others, but I am more active on these two. Very often, I'll see the referrer on LiveZilla coming from a post I made on either of these two.

Forums are always the best place to make advertisement. WHT has always been my top referring site along with Digitalpoint. I do post in Sitepoint often, but they don't turn a lot. Hope HD is going to be one in the top list, just joined

I agree. We see best results from word of mouth, our affiliate program and forum posting.

Word of the mouth as well as the companies solid customer satisfaction policies together would create a very great and powerful marketing package over the net. In the best mode, people would be telling each other about their great experiences of the companies they have used the hosting packs actually but for the starting, using some PPC and site advertising solutions can be recommended on the net.

I would look into all the free places that one could advertise. Places like facebook, twitter, forums, blogs and of course word of mouth.

Any place that needs it, I sometimes (like today) find a random place that has a horrible hosting company to deal with. I called to get a mani/pedi (yes during work lunch break) and went to visit the places site, poof its dead. I told him I am coming in for my mani/pedi on Tues. and bringing some hosting stuff over for him to look over in case he wants his site back up.