What Business Decision Improved Your Hosting Company More Than Any Hardware Upgrade?

[SenseiSteve]

We spend a lot of time discussing CPUs, SSDs, networking, and server specifications, but I'm curious about the business side of hosting.

Looking back, what single decision improved your company the most?

It could have been:

• Raising prices
• Firing difficult customers
• Automating provisioning
• Improving documentation
• Hiring staff
• Changing data centers
• Standardizing hardware
• Specializing in one niche
• Something completely unexpected

Which decision had the biggest long-term impact, and would you make the same choice again?

For me, it was firing impossibly rude customers.

 

[AlexTechie]

I would recommend focusing on customer support before investing in hardware upgrades. Fast knowledgeable support builds trust and retains customers far better than faster servers alone.

 

[bigredseo]

The biggest impact that we saw had to do with owning servers vs. renting servers.

We had 50+ servers that we physically owned and were located in a data center 40 minutes away. This is a problem when a failure happens, and you have to drive to fix something, or hot-swap a drive, etc. The data center space we leased performed SOME work, like reboots, etc, and we could remote into our servers, etc, but that also meant always being available.

When we swapped back to leasing machines, we moved from buying a $2,000 machine to renting a machine for $150/month. But we didn't have to think about hardware, reboots, or replacements. That freed up time and resources.

By the time I sold, we had over 400 instances that we maintained. The monthly bill wasn't cheap, but at the end of the day, it was worth every penny to go that route.

 

[bubblehost]

3 helped the business succeed phenomenally.
1. Changing data centers to a closer location to match our user base.
2. Aiming for better support (no AI usage unless completely necessary).
3. Lowering prices and offering managed hosting (we can afford it 🙂)