With web hosting or any business for that matter you always need to ask yourself what makes you unique in comparison to your competitors. If you do not do this it’s difficult to compete without an astronomical marketing budget. With Frog Host that question had to be asked as well because there are lots of providers offering unlimited everything at the same price range we plan on doing. We’re not prepared to offering insane payouts for affiliates or advertise on every single web site that has anything to do with web hosting. While we can advertise some places we just are not big enough to advertise everywhere like some. So thus I’ll run down what we think makes Frog Host unique.
LiteSpeed
I’m sure there are a few hosting providers offering the unlimited packages who run Litespeed but not exactly well run companies are even remotely reputable. Most are out of business in a short time and are extremely small that the common user would not have heard of them anyways. For the big providers though not a single one of them as far as I know use this on their web servers so this is indeed something unique to us. Litespeed is gaining steam among users as they associate it with higher performance and being able to handle more traffic. So it’s ideal as it increases performance for us as well as providing a marketing advantage.
R1Soft
Another feature pretty unique to us would be the fact we offer R1Soft as a free option to users. Like Hawk Host it’ll be 7 days worth of backups at all time and be accessible to the users. A lot of users associate unlimited hosting with poor backup policies which will not be the case with us. We’ll give users the ability to see them at all time which is a big advantage to show the users yes we do backups. It is also good for us as doing backups with R1Soft is much better than using say Rsync or even worth cPanel’s built in backup utilities. R1Soft is also a demand from users in all hosting aspects as a feature they want. So once again another marketing advantage for us having it available which is relatively unique to the hosting market Frog Host is targeting.
System Resource Usage
One big complaint from a lot of hosting customers is where is that imaginary line with regards to system resources. They have no way of knowing where that line is or when they compare to other users on the same server or even the entire service overall. We will be making it possible for users to see these sorts of statistics which should help with the problems associated with this for a lot of providers. As I said in another post we’ll give the user the ability to see CPU (PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python Ect.) MySQL and inodes at the start. So while not entirely unique it’s still a competitive advantage we have over the majority of our competitors. You can view more information about this portion more in depth at the blog post Resource Management System
So that’s what makes Frog Host unique in the market place. Though with any host you need to evaluate what makes you unique and a reason for customers to sign up with you. If you’re not unique you’re going to be a treadmill host with no serious gains after a while or even worse you do not even get off the ground before you’ve decided to close your doors. So remember the hosting market is saturated so make yourself unique otherwise it’s not going to go well.
hostfrog.com? What’s so unique about you guys?
We’re not hostfrog and I explained in the post what makes us unique.
i’m curios to see the differences between fh and the mothership.
i loove the r1soft backup, can’t say the same about litespeed, it doesn’t hurt though.
How do you define “unlimited hosting” under Frog Host?
@jasmu
The difference is the offering Hawk Host really caters to small allocations and a cheaper price. Hawk Host also offers pretty much everything under the sun. Frog Host is basically a few plans with very little difference and strictly web hosting. You pay a higher price for the care free space and bandwidth allocations as well.
@curious
We want to measure everything in terms of inodes, cpu and memory. Overall space and bandwidth is just meaningless to us. Always have tons of that.
For example Hawk Host has something like 3TB of space unused or maybe even more. Although FH will never share space on that respect it’s just an example. Bandwidth though last I checked we have about 25TB of bandwidth not being used. We can use that if FH bandwidth is much higher while not taking a loss since it’s all allocated to us already.
I believe every resource has a limit but you seem to be saying (correct me if I’m wrong) that Frog Host will provide true unlimited bandwidth and storage space but with limits on inodes, cpu, and memory? Is that right or am I a blur blob?
That’s the idea we’re going to be providing users with the information that can get their account shutoff. So that means CPU usage and such.
What can customers do if they hit the limits but do not want their account shut off because they’re happy with Frog Host?
At this point it’s really not something that has been explored. Some providers have tried or want to bill for using more CPU. That is something we might explore as well it’s really tough to say at this point that we will be doing it.
Usually unlimited hosting has 1 plan but in the case of Frog Host, you intend to offer a few plans. I assume the difference in the plans will be on the critical resources limits? If so, this may make it harder for customers to decide which plan to choose as they are often not aware of how much CPU/memory/inodes are being used by their websites.
In a way, I do see advantages in offering customers a few plans to choose. For example, if the customer starts with the lowest plan and hits the critical resource limits, you can advise them to upgrade to the next plan based on their resource statistics. If they’re on the highest plan and still hits those limits, then they probably have to upgrade to VPS or dedicated.
So having the resource statistics will really be useful, not only for showing the customers how much resources their sites consume, but also as an objective means to evaluate the need for an upgrade to the most appropriate plan.
The plans are actually just for a few settings:
Lowest plan comes with no add-on domains or parked domains. The middle tier plan comes with unlimited add-on and parked domains. The third tier plan comes with a dedicated IP as well as probably some other perks (SSL certificate or something along those lines)
Hello Tony,
All the best in your new venture. Please update me when accounts at froghost are available, I might take up an account.
Satisfied Hawkhost customer.
Hey Tony, is there a specific opening date of froghost?
what about data center? will it be the same (softlayer) or are you considering another DC?
@Maine
Should be the end of this month if things go as planned.
@J
We’ll be using Softlayer Dallas. One of the key points in an earlier post was the fact we had buying power to get machines cheaper. That would be sort of negated if we went to a datacenter where we had no machines.