1and1.com
Competitors
Over the years 1and1.com
website hosting has provided a steady stream of customers for us
mostly because of their too good to be true offers and FREE
domain registration.
As competitors they are very
much larger than we might ever be and they can afford loss
leaders like FREE Domain Registrations in an
effort to get more lucrative website hosting customers. They can
afford heavy TV marketing campaigns and create a huge buzz around
their website hosting product.
However for the people we see
moving that is where the smoke and mirrors ends and the service
fails for most people. Despite fancy graphics and promises of
success, people don't see to understand what to do once they buy
the website.
As far as ease of use of the 1and1.com
website builder it is very simple to use and has a huge number of
designs. And if you are looking for a simple 5 page business card
style website, that is great, cheap and solves all your problems.
But if you want more
than that, if you want:
Then you have to start using
the FTP interfaces and go into advanced website design or hire a
web developer to do it for you.
pageBuzz.com on the other hand
offers those types of features in our website builder unlike the
1&1 website builder.
Th pageBuzz tools offer more
advanced features and flexibility.
From what I have seen of the 1&1
system it is essentially a 2002 style builder that has not
changed over he years. You can change the title, type text in
designated areas and choose preset pages.
The problem with that is no
single business wants what another business wants, so you can
never have enough options to make everyone happy.
We learned that the hard way
with a very similar system on BumblebeeWorks.com
Website Hosting back in 2004.
People loved the ease of creating a website, then once it was
built, they wanted to add more and our system fell short.
Our solution was to
create pageBuzz.cm which was more flexible and better to build
more complex websites.
It seems the 1&1.com
solution is to keep going with what they have and run some TV
commercials to get more customers. And don't get me wrong,
that seems to be working for them and that is good for us,
because once people realize they can't do what they want at 1
and 1, they call pageBuzz for help.
What we realized is that
people all have different needs, different needs and to be
successful, they want to try different things.
The idea of selling them a
canned solution, one size fits all or the 1&1 style website
just does not work. It might get them in the door, but it wont
keep them for long.
Even competitors like Godaddy
have tried t corner the market offering every service imaginable
while we stay with one core product, our website building
platform.
Unlike these other mega
companies we don't offer every solution. We don't offer FTP
access, dedicated servers, VPS solutions and expensive upsells.
Not because we can't, but we don;t want to.
We can either offer everything
like they do and compete for the lowest price while companies
like 1&1 give away free services or we can pick one product
and do it better than anyone else.
We decided to build an easy to
use website builder better than 1&1, better than Godaddy and
better than Web.com or any other company for that matter.
While 1and1 spend million on
TV commercials we spend our time working with customers and
building the tools and programs they need.
We are never surprised when
customers of 1and1.com call us and want to transfer their domain
and website to pageBuzz.com. It happens quite regularly.
And the comments we get are,
"I could not even get anyone on the phone at 1and1 but you
guys are always there and you actually help me."
Obviously there is a much
different vibe at a smaller hosting provider than one the size of
1and1.com. We can be more friendly, spend more time with and do
more for each of our customers than larger companies can.
That makes our customer
happier and more satisfied with our product.
Now the fact is, we just don't
offer all the same products as 1and1.com, they offer many more
products than we can or ever will. But when it comes to the
website builder, we have them beat hands down.
Their whole model is just
dated, flawed and weak.
While they limit you to a
couple of preset paragraphs on a page, we offer full drag and
drop pages with no design limits.
While they have preset
graphics, we offer you the ability to add your own, use our
galleries or even create completely new images using the online
tools and our image composite editor.
They let you add plain text
over a title area using the 5 standard web fonts, we let you
render text into images using over 20,000 different font options.
We both offer a way to build
simple website, we just do it better, make it easier, faster and
offer better support.
We have learned by
answering our own support calls that people want more than just
simple.
Innovations like our image mapping tool
make it possible to add multiple links to a single image such as
the titlespace on every website. Users can link an email address,
pages, specials and other features within a single image.
Now, for webmasters this is old technology
that has been around forever, but why hasn't anyone though to
bring it to a website builder? Why do you need outside software
like ADOBE Dreamweaver to create image maps? Why shouldn't the
average user be able to do it on their website?
You don't have to be a psychic
to know that people want what they see other people doing. So in
the professional sites do it, they want the ability to do it.
People don't care that it took
a webmaster 4 hours to create an image map of the United States
they see it and they think they should be able to do it.
So we give them the tools to
do just that. Because they ask for it, because they want it and
because they need it.
I think a big reason for our
huge growth without the TV commercials has been our product. Our
customers almost never leave and when they do they call us to
apologize for going out of business. They tanks us for helping
them as much as we did and promise that if they start up again,
they will be back.
But at 1&1 they
just leave, often not being able to call support at all or get
help in the process.
When our customers do leave,
we help them. We will change names servers and transfer their
domains to them no charge while I have seen 1 and 1 charge $35 to
cover the cost of the domain they gave the customer free. At that
point the FREE domain is not so free.
Now nobody likes to see
customers leave, but that is just part of doing business and we
have to support those customers just as much as he ones that stay
with us. That is not something we have seen from companies like 1and1
and Yahoo.
Yahoo in particular will not
even allow you to call support once you cancel your website
hosting. Even though they still host your domain name, they only
allow you to email them for support and force you to deal with a
long drawn out process to get control of your domain name.
For us, we think
that is wrong and if you can't provide what people need you
should still respect that they tried your service.
All in all, pageBuzz and 1&1
are very different companies offer very different products and
have very different customers.
When it comes to who
is better in the website builder market, pageBuzz
wins hands down.
|
