I accept cash or card, but no cheques, thanks.

Posted on February 15th, 2010 by Cheyne | Linked in Opinion

It’s always amusing when I see our creativity being utilised by other companies, and however flattering it may be, you would at least think that companies who are much larger than us employ capable and competent business analysts to set the standard, rather than just keeping up with the Jones’.

With the launch of our new web site last week, we re-introduced the “Live Sales Chat” function after the majority of Australian web hosts had switched the service off. For our business model, it’s a great benefit for new and existing customers,  ensuring they are able to get the answer to sales-related questions quickly and easily.

Today, a competitor has launched a “Live Sales Chat” service on their web site, presumably after seeing it on our new web site. They’re more than welcome to the idea, in fact, I won’t be at all surprised if I see giant LCD screens or an integrated FAQ system on their site sometime soon.

This isn’t the first time this has happened to us. Our marketing strategies and offers are often replicated by competitors who simply lack the capacity to think outside the square.

While it’s humbling to know that we’re truly leading the way in terms of innovative ideas and automative productivity, I can’t help but feel like I’m a pseudo consultant for these companies. My usual rate for consultancy work is around $200.00 an hour, however I’m willing to apply our “50NOW” coupon taking 50% off the first invoice.

I accept cash, credit card, but no cheques, thanks.

Super Special plans now available

Posted on February 15th, 2010 by Cheyne | Linked in Announcements, Promotions

We’re trying something different this week as part of my campaign to bring in an ultra low cost hosting solution as a permanent offering.

Last week we had the Deal of the Decade, which two weeks in a row has sold out of the allocated stock.

This week we’re offering a new plan called the “Super Special” plan, that gives you 1GB of storage space and 30GB of monthly data transfer for just $29.00 for 2 years! For more information on the new plan please see http://www.ventraip.com.au/hosting/special/

There are just 250 accounts available, so get yours today.

1, 2, 3, 4, who’s gonna start a price war? Not us.

Posted on February 8th, 2010 by Cheyne | Linked in Opinion

The chattering on Whirlpool in recent hours has made me smile, with the suggestion that another web hosts’ ingenious plan to “slash prices” would somehow start a price war with us. Boy were they mistaken.

What many people fail to understand is that we don’t make a decision without it first being discussed among our Management team, which consists of four people who have more combined Management experience in this industry then almost any other Australian web host, nor do we simply “slash prices” to compete with a company who has less than 200 customers in total.

If they’ve made the choice to “smash and grab” for new customers then good on them, but that’s not a strategy we employ.

Prices on our Economy cPanel web hosting plans is based on having 98% business automation through the VIPControl system, running our own network, customer feedback which highlighted the fact that some customers don’t need phone support and other services (but were willing to pay additional for it if and when they needed it), and here comes that word again.. experience.

Last week we released a special offer called the “Deal of the Decade”, which gave customers a cPanel web hosting account at just $39.00 for 2 years. Crazy? Maybe, but as promised, I’m going to explain my methodology behind this plan.

When we were discussing how the web hosting industry is very similar to the airline industry, I came to the realisation that a segment of the airline industry was not yet represented in web hosting form. You see, there are the “Qantas” web hosts like NetRegistry and MelbourneIT, who offer a business grade service with all the trimmings, and then there are the “Virgin Blue” web hosts like SmartyHost and Hostess, who offer a consumer grade service with optional extras and addons. But where are the Tiger’s and AirAsia’s of the web hosting industry?

Ultra low cost carriers exist for the sole purpose of generating revenue for their parent company, and for increasing buying power when negotiating the purchase of new aircraft with suppliers, which has an overall positive effect on the business, providing they continue to get bums on seats.

And they do (get bums on seats that is), simply because of the price. How many times have you considered flying away in recent times simply because you’ve been able to access $29 airfares?

So the question I asked was: If we offered $39 web hosting accounts with 2 years of service, would people buy it simply because it was a bargain? The answer is a resounding “yes”. In just one week, we sold all 500 plans at $39, netting us $19,500 in additional revenue. You may be forgiven for thinking that a plan like this is unsustainable, and to most cPanel web hosts it would be, but when our customers have access to VIPControl, the “cost” of supporting these additional customers shrinks to almost nothing.

Think about it a different way. Imagine you have 500 customers who all want to enable SSH access, fix the permissions of their account, and enable temporary URL access. To every other cPanel web host in the world, they would need to call up or submit an email/ticket to the support desk in order to have a persona manually activate the services on their account. Our customers simply login to VIPControl, choose the options and enable or disable them.

So, we apply the same methodology as the ULCC’s and ask ourselves, if this offer was available every month, would we be able to sell 500 plans (one full 1RU server) each month for 24 months, giving us a total increase of 12,000 customers (after 24 months) and an additional $19,500 of ongoing monthly revenue?

Well, we want to find out.

Later today, we will be re-releasing our “Deal of the Decade” plans with another 500 plans available, to see if the initial reaction was simply a one-off, or whether there truly is an untapped market waiting to be explored. If there is, we’ll consider releasing the service as a permanent item under a separate brand name.

The moral of the story is that competing on price is one thing, but being able to back up those prices with a quality product and market-leading customer service is another. We’ve proven our model works with more than 18 months of constant growth behind us, and our customers have never been happier with the service we deliver, both through VIPControl and our friendly and experienced staff.

Can your web host do that?

Getting started with PHP

Posted on February 7th, 2010 by Craig | Linked in Hints, Tips & Tricks

So your just starting out using php and would like to see some sample php code to connect to a mysql database and retrieve some data? Sure. Let’s jump right in:

<?php

We start with the opening php tag, which tells php it should pay attention to the text after this tag as it is code.

$mysqlHostname = ‘localhost’;
$mysqlUsername = ‘myusername’;
$mysqlPassword = ‘mysqlpassword’;
$mysqlDatabase = ‘mysqldatabase’;

Here we have just setup some variables and assigned the mysql connection information to them. make sure you replace those details with your own.

if (!$link = mysql_connect($mysqlHostname,$mysqlUsername,$mysqlPassword)) {
die(mysql_errno().” : “.mysql_error());
}

Here we have established our connection to the mysql server. We have assigned the mysql connection object to $link and used the mysql connection details from earlier to connect. Should the connection fail, then the program will stop running and display the exact error for you. The ! at the front of the $link basically means equals false.

if (!mysql_select_db($mysqlDatabase)) {
die(mysql_errno().” : “.mysql_error());
}

Here we are trying to select out mysql database to work with. Should this fail, notice the ! again – then we make the program stop and print out the error details again.

$query = “SELECT id, firstname, lastname
FROM users”;
if (!$results = mysql_query($query)) {
die(mysql_errno().” : “.mysql_error());
}

Here we have created our sql query, in this case we are selecting the id, firstname and lastname colums from any entry in the users table of our database. We then run this query, by passing it to mysql_query and the results object is in $results. If it fails, ! again then the program stops running and prints out the error.

while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($results)) {
print “Firstname: “.$row['firstname'].”<BR>\r\n”;
print “Lastname: “.$row['lastname'].”<BR>\r\n”;
}

mysql_close($link);
?>

And finally we now get any results from the database and print them. The while loop will execute the command $row = mysql_fetch_assoc until it has no more results to get – then it will return false and cause the while loop to end. Then we close the mysql connection and put the end ?> in place.

That’s it – you have just created your php program to get results from a database connection and print them.

Here is the total program now for you:

<?php

$mysqlHostname = ‘localhost’;
$mysqlUsername = ‘myusername’;
$mysqlPassword = ‘mysqlpassword’;
$mysqlDatabase = ‘mysqldatabase’;

if (!$link = mysql_connect($mysqlHostname,$mysqlUsername,$mysqlPassword)) {
die(mysql_errno().” : “.mysql_error());
}

if (!mysql_select_db($mysqlDatabase)) {
die(mysql_errno().” : “.mysql_error());
}

$query = “SELECT id, firstname, lastname
FROM users”;

if (!$results = mysql_query($query)) {
die(mysql_errno().” : “.mysql_error());
}

while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($results)) {
print “Firstname: “.$row['firstname'].”<BR>\r\n”;
print “Lastname: “.$row['lastname'].”<BR>\r\n”;
}

mysql_close($link);
?>

Happy coding!

Welcome to the VentraIP Official Blog

Posted on February 6th, 2010 by Cheyne | Linked in Announcements

We are very proud to launch the new VentraIP Official Blog, which will be filled with loads of useful information from a wide variety of posters, including VentraIP staff, customers and other industry professionals.

On behalf of the team, we hope you enjoy our posts.