Hosting Prospect Monitoring and Outage Alerting

Netcraft has developed a service whereby hosting service providers can have access to detailed information on the present performance of their prospects’ sites, including timely notification of outages and the facility to compare and rank performance of the monitored sites.

This is a compelling sales tool:

• Prompt notification of outages means that sales approaches can be well timed.
• Measurements can be presented to prospects and customers as a justification for price differential, and also serve as an objective in house metric to judge performance relative to competitors.

Currently, price is a very significant factor in sales negotiations. Vendors with reliable facilities and fast, resilient networks have no easy way of empirically showing the prospect the quality of their network and infrastructure, or of knowing the quality of service that the customer receives from their current provider.

Collective ignorance plays into the hands of the service providers investing less in their infrastructure, since they are better able to discount, and their slower response times and network outages are less obvious to the customer.

Access to accurate, up to date, empirical information on the comparative network performance of sites significantly changes the playing field in favour of well informed companies with good quality networks and reliable service offerings.

Extra business won and the reduction in pressure to discount should amply cover the costs of the service

The Opportunity

Poor performance and especially, outages are a more immediate call to action for a company to replace in house solutions or switch hosting providers than provider financial distress- outages mean that customers may move with much more urgency.

Being able to enter a sales dialogue with a prospect a few hours or a day after a serious outage means that decisions may be taken while the customer is at a peak but transient level of dissatisfaction and frustration with his current solution.

Service Description

Netcraft provides a private access web site which contains all the details of your prospect sites’ performance. This is updated with information every 15 minutes. Facilities include:

• Outage alerts by electronic mail
• Sorting by outages, failed requests, and connect time
• Detailed graphs of performance
• Capability to directly compare and graph two sites
• Individual site portfolios for each account manager
• Change monitored urls at any time via web interface
• Facility to easily send an electronic mail with a cached page showing the performance statistics and graph to colleagues or to the site owner.

Your sales staff can have individual portfolios of sites and are able to add and remove sites whose performance they wish to monitor via a web interface. Monitoring of newly entered sites will normally start within 30 minutes, with graphs available as soon as there are sufficient points to plot.

The ability to directly compare two sites makes it possible for the service provider to visually demonstrate the reliability and speed of its network and facilities to prospects. This is particularly effective when the two sites are direct competitors in the same industry.

Netcraft can also assist in identifying prospects. We can identify sites that appear good prospects for a managed dedicated service provider – sites running high cost software solutions, such as Microsoft Commerce Server, Websphere, Vignette, and Oracle, or large companies running outdated software such as NT4, who could well fund an upgrade of their infrastructure.

Costs

Netcraft will bill according to the number of urls being concurrently monitored, from $200 per url per annum.

Next Steps

Project initiation can be very prompt. If you send us your site prospect list under NDA, we can set up monitoring immediately, and arrange the contents of individual profiles with your account managers.

Please contact us ( sales@netcraft.com) to start.