Mistakes Every Hosting Company Makes (And How to Avoid Them)

Over the course of over 70 episodes of the Shared Hosting Tips series, Site.pro CEO Filip Borcov traveled across the world meeting hosting providers, domain registries, and industry leaders. From Europe to Asia, Africa to Latin America, he sat down with people who built their companies from scratch, and asked them what they wish they had known earlier.

What came out of these conversations were honest stories: miscalculations, wrong turns, ideas launched too early, shortcuts that backfired, and lessons learned the hard way. These experiences are priceless for anyone building (or planning to build) a hosting business.

We’ve gathered real insights from founders and executives around the globe into the most common mistakes hosting companies make. Let’s dive in.

Neglecting Branding

The lack of identity expressed through elaborate branding can pretty much lead to failure in the long term. Tewin Sham from Icy Evolution & Tidalwavesх admits that not focusing on branding early on is one of his biggest regrets. They were changing the name of the company every six months.

Customers didn’t get a chance to remember the company. Because of it, for the first couple of years it was completely unknown.

Tewin also emphasises that branding is especially important, because most of their clients come from direct referrals — people already using their service. That’s why keeping a consistent name and branding is essential for the existing audience to remember you, and for the potential — to be able to discover you.

Not Planning Ahead

The lack of vision and planning is one of the most common mistakes businesses make early on. Seb de Lemos warns against operating without a clear direction. When his company was first started, he didn’t know what direction to go, which led to missed opportunities later on.

Understanding your value, growth plan, and long-term goals is fundamental to building a resilient hosting company. Lay the foundation early on, learn from others’ mistakes, yet stay flexible.

Promises You Cannot Keep

It might be tempting to advertise your service as one having 100% uptime, 0% downtime and perfect speed. However, if you’re not 110% sure that you can deliver on it, you should find another selling point. Even big hosting providers advertise their services as 99.9% uptime, not 100% — and for a good reason. Avoiding potential accusations pre-emptively is better than having to deal with damage control after your servers unexpectedly go offline and you have hundreds of mad customers.

Learn from the experience of Web-server.hu. Back in the day, they told everyone they had 100% uptime, until one day their servers went down, and no one knew how to deal with this situation.

Over-Hiring

Imran Hossen from Eyhost.biz shared that this biggest mistake was made at the very start of his company. He hired 13 people at once, which is a lot for a business that’s only starting out. Without any clients, it’s very hard to sustain a team.

When you start a company — you have no clients, so it’s unrealistic to expect enough profit for a big team. It’s better to have a small team, and then scale as more specialists are needed.

Launching Before Testing

Another mistake a hosting company can make is to launch a product without proper testing. Even if you don’t lose that much money directly, you lose days of work and human hours on redoing the project. PTisp learned it the hard way — the team of developers was convinced that their website was great, but after soft launch there weren’t any sales. After that, they started doing a lot of tests before actually launching anything.

Inexperienced developers often underestimate the impact of UX, while overestimating the technical literacy of their potential clients. Ambitious ideas that sound good too might be too complicated for end-users.

Eyhost.biz tried to implement automated website creation, but when they tested the system’s design with customers, it turned out that the design wasn’t good at all. Simple concepts and simple designs usually work best.

Right Product, Wrong Time

My name was a product introduced by LK Domain Registry, whose purpose was to sell personal domain names. It was originally launched around 12–15 years ago, and it didn’t see a lot of popularity. There is nothing particularly wrong with the idea, but there wasn’t a lot of demand in Sri Lanka for personal domain names back in 2011.

Sometimes the products don’t land not because the idea itself is bad, but because the time for it to shine hasn’t come yet. So, what’s the solution? Revisit old ideas from time to time if it seems like they have potential in the current market.

Too Many Options

It seems like a good idea to offer customers a lot of different plans and packages, so they can choose the best option for them. HostPico.com thought it would be great to have a lot of packages and different services. Now, they think it was a big mistake.

It’s better to simplify services. Otherwise, you might inflict choice paralysis on your customer.

It’s also true when it comes to coming up with new projects in general. When you have too much on your plate, it becomes hard to manage. It results in a lot of stress and overdue deadlines. The practical experience of Ahaduweb.com shows that sometimes you shouldn’t engage in too many projects at once, and instead focus on a couple of smaller tasks. Less is more.

Conclusion

Something you might perceive as a failure at first can turn out to be the biggest win. It was exactly the case for HostAfrica. In the beginning, they tried to trade cloud computer capacities. It simply didn’t work. The business had no profit, and after a couple of years they had to close. But after that, the project of HostAfrica was born — a successful hosting company.

It’s good to learn from mistakes, but it’s not worth fixating on them. After all, as it was brilliantly put by the chief product architect of GoDaddy — "Failures are an important part of being a business".

Check out the full Shared Hosting Tips playlist to get even more insights on the world hosting industry.