How Can You Make Hosting Sexy?

IT is boring.

Domains aren’t “sexy” or “exciting” and to be frank anyone who gets excited about a server probably needs to get out more.

That may seem to be an odd statement coming from me, but it’s not far from the truth. Hosting is an incredibly important service. Screw it up and people’s websites and businesses stop working.

But like a lot of things it needs to “just happen”. It should be in the background and it should “just work”.

Of course if you work in the sector and are passionate about technology then your feelings about it all are going to be quite different. I am deeply passionate about both hosting, domains and technology in general. But I also like to be realistic. I know that not everyone feels as passionate about these things as I do and expecting them to is just plain silly.

The “problem” however is that the “average” business person isn’t going to be as excited about the technology as you are. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just a reality.

So one of the challenges we all face is marketing our services to businesses and personal users.

What kind of “tone” or “message” should you use?

How are you presenting the product or service?

How do you make “your” hosting more attractive?

Domains are something that I think a lot of people and businesses don’t think about enough. Choosing a good domain name for your venture (be it business or personal) can have an impact on it. Yes, you can still succeed with a mediocre domain name, but a strong, memorable domain name will make marketing it easier ..

So how can you market services that aren’t “interesting” to most people?

I know there’s more than one answer and the answer will also depend a lot on who you are speaking to ..

But “having fun” or “being playful” is a method that we’ve been using for several years. Does it work? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. And yes, we sometimes do get criticised for how we do things. But let’s face it, who gets it right 100% of the time?

A couple of simple examples ..

Back in the 1980s there was a poster (and postcard) doing the rounds with the apt caption of “expose yourself to Ireland”. So when we were trying to market .xxx domain names we did an image inspired by that:

More recently we’ve been pushing a variety of new TLDs. One that we really like is .farm. Ireland is, after all, an agricultural country. So .farm domain names should be popular here. And since so many of us have a “relationship” with the countryside it’s not hard to come up with some rather silly marketing collateral.

This one is downright silly, but it’s also amusing: