The Covid-19 pandemic turned many tables upside down for businesses small and large across various industries. The web hosting business was no alien to this. So many businesses that were following a brick and mortar model had to adapt to an online-first model, only because of the pandemic. Some who never even thought that their business would go online saw that their business could sail comfortably with online transactions with e-commerce.
In such a situation, reseller hosting providers had to stand firm and overcome many obstacles with respect to support, marketing, infrastructure and a whole bunch of small business challenges. Not to mention the fact that this pandemic saw a huge surge in new entities that became the fastest-growing small businesses in a span of a year and a half, all thanks to the strategies and tactics adapted by reseller hosting providers.
With this article, we are going to go into those aspects and challenges that were faced by reseller hosting facilitators in the web hosting industry. As small businesses that were providing reseller web hosting plans faced a number of obstacles in day to day business, they also had to encounter many unknowns on the way. So, if you want to know more about how reseller hosting businesses adapted to the pandemic, please read further.
Here is how you as a reseller can adapt your web hosting business during the pandemic
1. Changing strategy but not the goals
As resellers in the web hosting industry, one of the challenges faced because of COVID-19 was a disruption in daily tasks and routine which hampered the strategies and tactics drawn out to reach business goals. The nature of the pandemic made it hard for reseller hosting providers to keep up with business goals. One of the reasons is that the pandemic made it difficult to stick to the strategy that they developed at the beginning of the financial year.
Many resellers chose to mitigate losses by focusing on current customers rather than spending more on new acquisitions because, with the pandemic, budgets had taken a hit. As budgets took a hit, many sought a safe route of building on the reputation of the brand by giving discounts to current customers so that they stayed and were retained. This became a priority because, during the pandemic, hardware prices soared costs had to be mitigated. Since web hosting as an industry needs hardware and software resources both, many reseller hosting businesses continued strongly with a strategy that catered to satisfying current customers with some amount of spending on customer acquisition.
2. Adapting to increase in demand
A positive outcome of the COVID-19 for reseller hosting businesses was the increase in demand. This was mainly because many retailers went online with e-commerce and digital models and had to get a website for themselves. This benefitted the web hosting and specifically resellers a lot with increasing demands to buy hosting space quickly and having them deployed swiftly.
E-commerce and digital became major channels for many new, old, and emerging businesses that were not online but only followed an offline model. A sudden surge in demand to be online did put a lot of pressure on reseller hosting businesses and many sought tactics where the customer support had to be aligned with automation to onboard new customers on a simplified journey with a lot of DIY (Do it yourself) models. For those resellers who couldn’t do the same, 24/7 support that worked from home and could answer queries from Google My Business accounts helped newer customers get the answers they needed to get online.
3. Consolidating customer support
With work from home, customer support had to face a lot of issues because not many had access to support functioning and tools and software that made their life simple in normal times. To overcome this barrier, reseller hosting businesses and companies adapted online platforms and Google authenticator to provide access to customers and raise tickets through their partner hosting provider.
In this manner, consolidation of customer support teams became possible, and there was no way in which new and old customers could be served without any hindrances. With security measures taken care of, adapting to the work-from-home scenario became even easier for customer support.
4. Shift in marketing budgets and spends
As mentioned above, cost mitigation led to change in marketing budgets. Many reseller hosting businesses changed their goals and went for thrifty tactics where they could get an ROI on smaller investments. With budgets and marketing spends crunching in order to accommodate rising costs on infra, resellers ensured that the spending was justified on the right activities.
Since everyone had taken to online platforms such as Hangout and Google meet, even annual web hosting events were done online. Reseller hosting businesses benefited from webinars because they could talk about topics that were of great interest to their customers at length and get business from them with little or no spends. This was the power of adapting to ways and means because of the pandemic for reseller hosting providers and resellers as well.
5. Encountering unknowns with security
With many businesses going online and individuals working from home, the susceptibility to cyber threats increased fourfold during the pandemic. With more and more attacks prevailing in cyberspace, resellers have had a difficult time keeping up with the changes vis-a-vis cyber security.
Some reseller hosting businesses took to educating and informing their team members and employees in a bid to protect their clients’ hosting. One of the solutions, when we talk about protecting your website and your clients’ too from unknown threats, is to check for discrepancies with constant vigilance and monitoring of your assets. Also, taking frequent cloud backups helps. If this is not going to solve your problems as a reseller hosting business, there is nothing that would. In addition to this, being resilient in the face of adversities really helps, especially by being fully aware of your IT infrastructure would really help.
Conclusion
Adapting to the pandemic has been really stressful no doubt. But it is through conditions and situations like these that new ideas emerge and brings out the best within us as resellers. By combating a recession and a business disruption, many reseller hosting businesses uncovered better ways to do business and even some newer entities emerged. With this article, we hope that you will be able to handle worst-case scenarios with your reseller hosting business ahead if it ever comes.
If you have any feedback for us on this article or your own experiences to share, please do share them in the comments section below.
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