What is Hostetic?
I remember the problems that I faced when I had to setup truetricks and similar websites. The idea of free and quality web hosting is fake. There is always a catch, just like any other beginner I did not want to spend money on web hosting this led me to a big problem. I was stuck between this free hosting websites for a long time that had regular downtimes frequent server security issues, no SSL certificate etc.
Keeping these things in mind, I thought of making a website that solves all these problems. I wanted to provide a platform that provided everything needed by a beginner to kick start his web presence.
When I say web-hosting don’t confuse yourself with the websites that let you work with a subdomain with limited features, but everything that is needed like SSL certificate etc.
Here is what I learned:
1: Right name is important
I remember starting websites that had big long names, it might seem obvious to have an attractive and good name. but What makes a good domain name?
1. Easy to remember
2. Easy to spell
3. Use common TLDs ( .com preferred )
4. If possible less than 10 characters.
5. Self Descriptive
The choice of TLDs is more specific, but if it is for the general public you need to be very choosy. A Self Descriptive domain name always helps.
I won’t be exaggerating if I said I spent over a day to find this name. But wait, It is not necessary that the name you like is the name you should choose. Always consider people, as many as you can. After all, you won’t be using your site, someone else would.
Read more on this: https://www.score.org/resource/how-choose-domain-name-drives-traffic
2: Right Logo and website:
Your website might do a different task than mine, but just like you, nobody reads the entire website. People often glance the website and would decide in those few seconds whether they would continue. Hence be very specific on the front page. Tell what is important & Keep the signup process as simple as possible. Don’t ask what you would never need.
Hostetic logo:
Logo: Why not keep it simple and descriptive.
3: The most important: Promotion
- Reddit: I was not aware of how important role Reddit can play until one of the senior at college told me. Finding the right subreddit is important but once you find it and if your product is worth it
,i t won’t take long for you to generate traffic that is purely organic and sufficient. - Facebook ads: I used Facebook ads in the start, If you target the right people it can really help to grow the presence of the website, but what I found was, facebook
ad works for a limited time. If you stop the ads the traffic would again fall to zero. - Youtube is the Savior: What helped me most was youtube, In the end, I got nearly 70% of my traffic from a youtube video I uploaded. Youtube works in a different way, If people search for some keyword on youtube the competition is much lesser than searching it on google.
- Blog posts: In the end, inorganic traffic won’t last, Ask your friends write a blog on your website/service. You can also add a promotion on the website for the visitors from the blog.
- Facebook Groups: You don’t need to make one, find a facebook group that is related to your website and tell people about it.
- Right people right help: In my case, the website was going to help bloggers or techies, I talked to some of my friends who were techies and asked them to share the website, this really helped me boost the traffic.
- Other websites like hackernews and producthunt might help you, but I did not use them and have no experience with it.
The result:
In the
The mistakes I made:
- I had no
plans what to do if the website grew, I had the ability to handle about 1000-1200 users. This struck me bad since when I got about 800-850 users and the website grew rapidly. The growth was stagnant since I had to disable signups/remove inactive accounts. I won’t say it is necessary to always think of this, but In my case it was. - No strict earning plan: I needed money to keep the service growing. I had rapid growth on the website that meant I had to invest more money, but the only source of money I had was through Ads and I miscalculated the earnings.
- Ignoring support tickets, I started getting 10-12 support tickets daily, and I let them pile up. This really left a bad impression on users. If you cannot answer them, ask someone to or disable the option, leaving them unanswered is probably the worst option.
The mistakes were too big for me to continue, I found the right person who wanted to buy Hostetic. I decided to sell it at a reasonable cost, He is currently handling the website.
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