The blog wasn’t started when we first started planning out Frog Host so I figured it be logical to talk about what is done thus far. Frog Host is several months in the making already so everyone has missed out on a lot.The first part is obviously the name it self how did we come up with it? We wanted to stick to our animal theme name so it was a matter of finding a great name. After searching for any random animal and checking the availability of domains it sort of went nowhere. We just could not find a domain with an animal that was catchy enough you’d remember. So we decided maybe Sedo was the place to go as far as finding a domain. We used it to get Hawk Host so it was worth a try in this case as well. I actually went through the entire list myself going name by name and I finally saw one that I said wow that might actually work. So checked the price on the Frog Host name and $500 seemed not to bad so made the purchase along with buying every other froghost tld that was available. So there you go the name alone cost us more than most of these start up hosts on the internet spend as their entire initial investment. We’ve got a great name so now it’s onto the more exciting parts I suppose…
Well before we could go any further we had to once again review our pre launch budget which outlines our costs as far as the web site design, licenses for software and whatever else we might need. So we budgeted the following for the initial steps:
- $1500 for logo, mascot and web site design which I think is a modest amount it’s not as much as some will pay but at the same time it’s probably more than most.
- $499.95 for our Support suite license from Kayako
- $180 for our vbulletin license
- $324.95 for our whmcs license
Then once we had our servers live we figured the following costs:
- $122 Sitebuilder
- $349 R1Soft
- $x Litespeed (can’t reveal our cost)
- $x Server (can’t reveal our cost)
So it was a modest guesses as far as the costs it was by no means the best planned out estimates. Compared to other start up companies though I think it’s more well prepared compared to them who will just jump in with the $100 server and a few licenses and go with it. We actually had known our estimated costs well before hand
So once we had our estimated budget it was time to actually get some of this done. The first thing was the logo and mascot which you can already see on our web site as well as on our twitter account. We like to believe the mascot and logo are a bit part of the company. With Hawk Host we have people all the time tell us that wow your mascot is amazing I won’t forget your company. Even our competitors talk about our Mascot all the time on forums as something they will not forget. It’s probably a big reason there is constantly discussions about us on various web site hosting forums as well as just webmaster forums in general.
The next step once you have the logo and mascot is to actually get a web site designed. We also provide designs with the logo and mascot this was no different in this case. We laid out what we’d like to see as far as features and what we’re trying to do. We believe we did a great job at doing that and well unfortunately I can’t show the web site right now but I think it’s pretty amazing. You’ll need to wait until the site launch to see it as it’s something I cannot show before hand. As far as cost it was not cheap but a web site is a big part of a web host so if you’re cheap on that front it’s going to hurt you in the long run as you’ll lose potential customers.
At this point with a web site design done and mascot and such it was onto doing some more fun things well I guess as far as I’m concerned. We’ve spent the past few weeks working on a new version of our CMS system we use to manage our web sites which includes Hawk Host as well. This has been completed so Frog Host at this point has it’s coding done as far as PHP and such. We’re just working on the content aspects which is a huge part of any web host. If your content isn’t great then you’ll lose customers in that aspect. You’ll also lose out on potential search engine hits which can really help boost sales.
I guess the other fun part that people have missed out on as it was the first thing we started working on. That’s the cPanel modifications we’re making so that we can monitor things like CPU usage, MySQL usage, Inodes ect. I’ll talk about this in another post but basically it’s something that we’re doing to give users an idea of the actual limitations of their hosting. Space and bandwidth we could careless about but the system resources is what we want to make them aware of.
