What has kept your business alive and your clients happy?

15 years in the web hosting busienss.

Secrets to success - honesty. Majority of our new clients come from referrals and they too see the honesty and transparency. We treat customers as friends, and give them REAL answers to issues, or explain tings if they need to be explained. We could double our prices and more than 80% of our customer base would stay with us without a doubt.

^ He has a good point, too many people in this industry (client wise) have already dealt with or heard about the bad places, how clients are treated, how things are never explained, how rep's just do not care.

See my sig, it stands true for all clients. Another thing is being quick about things. I have some clients that like to chat on the phone and others who are find with sending in a support ticket if needed, but clients are people too and some places tend to forget that.

And yes, deff. been in business more than 2 years, just not as long as the pro Conor has.

One recommendation I like to give is that you are selling your honesty and trust, not your services. The majority of web hosting offers are a commodity where thousands of other hosts can offer the exact same thing and some offer it at dirt cheap prices. So what you need to think about here is whether you are trying to sell your services like all the others or if you are trying to sell the team behind the services. Once you focus on the right assets of your business, then people will gain confidence in you and will start sending more business your way.

The majority of businesses that I have had the pleasure of consulting with did very little advertising and still managed to grow their business year after year. After a thorough analysis, we discovered that about 70-80% of their business came from people referrals.

If you treat your clients as if they were your own business, then they will return the favor back to you without anything in return (most of the time).

Hope this helps.

Started as Primary Network on April 15, 1996. Hostirian name began in 2001 as a Primary Network company, but now is a River City Internet Group company along with Primary Network.

What has kept our business alive? Started with as many as 60 sales reps pounding the streets building a huge local base - with hands on solutions. Survived the .com crash and emerged very streamlined. Original company sold to MPower Communications in 2000 for $145 million, but we recovered our name, over 95% of our clients and all of our infrastructure (with enhancements) when MPower scaled back their national expansion.

What has kept our clients happy? Workable solutions that we both agreed upon. Flexibility to adapt to change. Honesty above all else. And a stable infrastructure (and upgrades) that have weathered the years.

And let's not forget all the dedicated staff who eat, drink and sleep this stuff everyday - keeping it all together.

At first clients get attracted to cheap prices but for longer relations support, service and customer relations comes into play. As per my personal view, the key for longer business is how you treat your customers and the quality of service provided.

CSN-UK as a brand and company has now (of January) been publicly available a year , however the company or particularly “companies” who merged to form CSN-UK have the combined age of 5 years as such we started with a new info structure but the same team resulting in an easy transition.

The companies that merged where a combination of small local design firms that all ran standalone office based computers for their hosting previsions with no real stress for specific standards. As such the webhosting side of the design firms got together and a standard was made and as such the design business though independent of CSN-UK, provides business from one of a few local markets we utilise.

Though we don’t have a 15 year track record just yet though, we can have our 1 year anniversary shortly though one word of advice Id perhaps give is that of, having too many designers can lead to a lot of opinions and heated discussion on site design so fielding reviews to external users is always a good option

It do sent matter wether you been in business for more than 5 years or 10, It matters on how you treat your clients, Treat them as if how you would like to be treated. Don't lie to them tell them what's really going on.

As for HandsOnHosting I heard a lot about them and yes, If they would of double there plans prices and more clients would still stay with them.

The company I'm with now is a new one, HostJackpot. Everyone involved in this project has years of experience to contribute to the team. We're doing quite well thus far and expect to be in business for years to come.

Like you've all said, it's a matter of reputation. At TurnKey Internet we focus 100% on customer satisfaction. We work really hard to answer all tickets promptly and thoroughly. We include customer reviews on our website too, which instills confidence in new customers.

10 years & going strong
up-time & fast quality support

I currently have been in business for 3 years. Started when i was 17

Your services are what keeps you surviving in the market. Nothing else can help you there.

Yes.

My main goal is to keep my customers happy and satisfied.

My own personal offline business (janitorial) has been in business for 5 years. What Conor said above is how we operate. By far and away, we are NOT the cheapest in the area, quite the opposite, but we are very professional, and help them as necessary, sometimes for free, sometimes for a cost.

Also, I am getting a lot of referrals lately just from giving free advice to people calling seeking help. (interesting effect)