Highlights:

• Site5.com - a well-established Web Hosting company - needed an objective, third party reference data to demonstrate its capabilities and expertise to its prospective and current Customers, as well as to extrapolate trends and patterns for its own strategic planning process.
  
  
• WebSitePulse Stats Publisher feature allows real-time access to performance measurement data and its display on publicly accessible web pages for reference, proof of service reliability or for analytical purposes.

The Challenge:
Demonstrate professional capabilities and expertise as leading Web Hosting service provider through a simple yet very compelling Key Performance Indicator (KPI) - servers' uptime.

Site5.com offers robust web hosting solutions to its Customers and has earned its reputation for reliability in both customer service and support.
The barriers of entry into the web hosting businesses are extremely low because of the inexpensive hardware and easy access to software and knowledge. Competition in this market becomes even more intense and sometime fierce. Potential Customers are tempted and often distracted by hundreds of low cost offers, free trials, promotional features, and promised results. However, reliability, and consistently superior service levels are the ultimate selection criteria for the serious buyers.
On the other hand, the Internet is getting more and more complex, and explaining every single aspect and detail of the services is virtually impossible during a phone call or e-mail communication with a potential Customer. There must be something simple but very compelling to grab his attention first, and to open his overprotective mind to the professional details.

Site5.com management surveyed some of its current Customers to find out what the key indicator is, that puts a Web Hosting company on their "top 5" list. The response was almost unanimous and simple - performance and reliability, as measured by the servers' uptime. As long as the website is up and running, and meets its visitors' expectations, the owners are happy with the provider.

The Solution:
WebSitePulse Stats Publisher

"Stats Publisher is a feature that enables us to have direct, real-time access to WebSitePulse servers and to retrieve a wide range of statistics created for the websites and applications we are hosting and monitoring. Performance data is available in HTML and in Excel formats. This is quite convenient for us because we can effortlessly display the information on our public web pages or use it to create graphs and charts for various analytical and representative needs.

We realized that this was a strong selling point, and "Uptime Reports" became an integrated part of the "Support Center" section of our website. Using third party, objective and independent confirmation for our professionalism and expertise is a simple and quite compelling proof of reliability that contributes to our high levels of Customer conversion rate."

Some Web Hosting companies still consider third party monitoring as a competitive activity or even a threat. However, this type of monitoring measures the performance of multiple systems and components situated behind the firewalls of the hosting facility from the end-user's perspective. Therefore, it is a reliable indicator about the end-user experience, which should be the primary concern of a professional ISP. Providing objective information about the hosting servers performance will become one of the key differentiators for the web hosting companies in the near future.

The Result:

WebSitePulse Stats Publisher offered Site5.com a simple and intelligent solution to demonstrate its capabilities, potential, and real results. Remote and objective monitoring provided Site5.com with continuous feedback about the servers' performance, and allowed the company to maintain the highest levels of service and operational standards for its Customers.
The accumulated data served as an excellent reference for Site5.com, and helped many prospective clients make Site5.com their primary choice of web hosting service provider.

With the rapid proliferation of the Internet, web-services - from basic hosting to complex systems integration - will become a highly competitive arena. Positioning a web hosting service as a reliable and dependable basis for any further web-based presence or activity will be based on independent reference and objective proof of performance. And this will be the best guarantee Customers can get.

Download this case study in PDF format