The last few days have seen some interesting developments in the Irish hosting market.
Earlier this week Novara launched a budget hosting service, while Eircom have also entered the foray with lower pricing on their virtual hosting.
The move by Novara comes a couple of weeks after their highly publicised statements on IE domain pricing.
How existing clients paying € 30 more for IE domains with their main brand will react remains to be seen. No matter how you spin it a domain is a domain is a domain.
The Eircom move was picked up earlier today on the open list and John comments on it:
For an ISP it was quite an innovative move but it was easy to see Eircom’s call-centre management mentality at work. The market has moved on and retail hosting is often an impulse purchase or personal recommendation purchase.
In typical fashion they are not providing any way of ordering online (the “buy now” is actually a “request callback” form) but, when you consider their overall market strength, they could still gain some new business. If nothing else they may be able to stem the tide of SMEs moving over to companies such as ourselves.
The new Eircom hosting plans, however, are not exactly generous.
All of the hosting plans seem to be static webspace without any support for perl, php or mysql.
Although a lot of SMEs may not have much use for MySQL with their first “online presence” the lack of other server-side scripting languages is a bit short-sighted.
They also do not offer any form of control panel, so clients are reliant on Eircom tech support to handle the simplest of functions. This may have been a viable option several years ago, but the hosting market has changed a lot since then.
Automation and autonomy are the norm.
We still get a lot of clients that require no server-side scripting or databases. If anything they only want a contact form, and Eircom will probably set up a generic one for everyone to use (most likely the security hole that is Matts FormMail).
Theres also the interesting fact that a lot of small businesses use @eircom.net email addresses on all advertising / branding – theres a lot of them on vans driving around Limerick at any rate. I know thats no reason to not get proper hosting, but people often stay with the company that they know rather than the entity that they don’t. I think it’ll be a long time before Eircom start losing this type of customer.
To “we are off to Dublin in the green(backs) in the green
We’re off to Dublin in the green”
that kind of tune,
Hostyle
I know what you mean, however with the current pricing on domains and hosting from companies such as ourselves and our competitors there is no reason for an SME to settle for this kind of hosting anymore.
The new Eircom pricing structure is a lot more realistic than what was there prevoiusly, but whether it will help stem the move away from them to HSPs is another story
Michele