Mrdredd said:
About how many people on these forums, and in the webhosting world, do you think would actually pay a premium service fee, for everything they look for in a host.
We can't view the hosting market as homogenous. If somebody has a personal blog or a family picture site they're going to visit once a month, they'll be pretty price-sensitive.
For a business, it's a different story. If you look at the costs of running a business nowadays (personnel, rent, telephone, inventory, advertising, etc.), then it really doesn't matter whether you pay 5 bucks a month or 50 bucks a month for your hosting. It's an insignificant part of your overall expenses, and probably about the most beneficial part in terms of how much it does for you per dollar spent.
I have an online store that takes 5-10 orders a day (for the record, it uses under 50 MB of disk space and very little CPU or bandwidth). I used to pay $35 a month to host it. I didn't mind paying that, but I eventually moved because the server was too slow. I then moved it to another host who charged $30 a month. Again, I didn't mind paying, but I moved it again because although their server was faster, they had extensive downtime most weekends (for maintenance, I guess, but they never really gave any reasons), and we were missing orders. I now host it myself, but I basically wouldn't even consider a sub-$10 host for that site. And I certainly wouldn't host it with a company which looks like it's been slapped together by a teenager who doesn't even know how to spell.
Part of your question was "how many people in these forums" would pay for premium hosting service. A quick survey of our customers says that almost none of them visit online hosting forums. A quick survey of posts in these forums says people are really price-sensitive here. So I think there's probably an inverse relationship. Most people who care about support, service, and reliability enough to pay for it don't spend time in hosting forums, so this isn't an ideal place to target those customers.
