Shared Hosting Tips in Canada

Rebel is a hosting company and a domain registrar based in Ottawa, Canada. The company has both local and international clients and a variety of publishing tools. Continuing our “Shared Hosting Tips” series and looking into the shared hosting markets around the world, we’ve met with Brett Tackaberry, the technical director of Rebel.com to learn more about their experience in the Canadian market. Watch the interview and read on to learn what he had to share!

Canadian Hosting in Numbers

In an attempt to better understand its customer base, Rebel has detailed statistics on the number of registrants. Based on their information, there are around 13 million domain names in Canada, out of which 2.8 are .CA domain names. In total, there are around 4 million websites, but it's hard to tell which one is shared hosting. Brett mentions that although the domain name growth has slowed down, the hosting space is growing. In Canada and the states roughly only 60% of businesses have websites, so there is still a large market and huge opportunity.

Customer Support and Language

In Canada, depending on the region, English and French are spoken, so for companies in the Canadian market, providing support in both languages is important. Although Rebel focuses mainly on the English-speaking regions, the company does have French-speaking support agents, and there is always someone clients can talk to if they need it. “There’s a different culture around the country, so you need to be pretty cognisant across your work about the culture, the language, etc,” mentions Brett.

Servers, Pricing, Growth: Rebel’s Strategy

Rebel is a global company working with international clients, and they want to expand globally, both as a registrar and shared domain hosting. “We have servers in Canada, East and West coast of the United States, Australia, Dublin, Frankfurt, Paris, in Asia, and have customers in all those regions.” In Canada, the average price for shared hosting is a bit more expensive than in the US. Rebel has planned to be not the cheapest, but also not the most expensive service. “We try to be lower than half, with an average of 5-10 CAD per month. However, the pricing grows based on features. When buying a service, no matter the price, customers expect quality; they want to have a fast, working, and secure website.”

Website Builders in Canada: Popular or Not So Much?

Rebel launched a website builder 2-3 years ago, and according to Brett, it enabled people to activate their domain names. Rebel uses their website builder as a separate product, mainly for customers who are not very tech-savvy. It also offers different hosting programs, and people can choose to upgrade to them. “The big thing of getting your customers online is the ease of launching the first website. If you sell a domain name and get your customers to publish even one page or something small, they start using that domain and renew the subscriptions. You then get opportunities to upgrade that client.”

Hosting Preferences of the Local Market

Most Canadian companies host outside of the country, but that’s been changing recently. It happens mainly because the quality of data centers is improving: they are providing better quality, and lower pricing. However, as of now, Canadian companies still host their website in the United States.
There are no laws in the country regarding hosting, except for the governmental website, which should be hosted in Canada. But Brett thinks that the Canadian government can educate the population about the importance of hosting their data in Canada, and the importance of data safety.

Marketing and Promotion of Hosting Services

When it comes to marketing and promotions, it’s important to spend a lot of time on measurements. Rebel invests considerable resources into measuring the performance of their campaigns, and customer engagement, and this enables them to reach out to customers with the right messaging. “We’ve become more focused with our campaigns, and started telling people what’s good for them, rather than what’s good for everywhere. Additionally, we help to do free migrations. The hosting market is saturated by advertising, that’s why we’ve been using other methods as well. Twitter has been successful, email automation is very important too. We run a lot of campaigns targeting different segments, like marketing and news agencies, to find our market. With email automation, it’s easy to see who clicked through, so we can send follow-ups. Sometimes, it’s a barrier for people to join, but doing that for free really helps.”

The company has also been running ads offering 70% off the first period, which helped to attract many users. However, sales like free domains or $1 domains don’t work for the company, because they don’t produce good customers. “We’ve learned over the years that you want to focus on the clients who are going to use your domains.”

Rebel is using agile methodology across the whole company, as well as an MVP approach, preferring to experiment and learn rapidly by launching small/beta/pilot features and tweaking them instead of launching something big every 6 months, risking failure.

Wrapping Up

Understanding new markets come with its share of challenges, but also opportunities. Looking into and trying to understand the Canadian market has been quite interesting, as the country offers a lot of untapped possibilities, and is open to international companies.

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