In The News
2005
ClickZ.com
December 16, 2005 Hostway Hopes to Repeat Viral Success
Hostway Hopes to Repeat Viral Success
ClickZ News By Kevin Newcomb
Following the success of its popular "Bob's Cube" viral site launched earlier this year, Web hosting provider Hostway and 15 letters have created "Leroy the Hand." "In a crowded and commoditized space, they have struggled for differentiation," Mark Rattin, president and creative director at 15 letters, told ClickZ News. "We've helped them create branded interactive events that are designed to promote the brand in a more grassroots way.
They allow for people to pass along a message that inherently is a marketing message, but is wrapped in a shell of entertainment and interactivity." The site tells the story of Leroy Koslowski, a hand that struggles with the success of his brother, who gained fame as a spokesmodel for a "Hamburger Helper"-style brand. Leroy did not share his brother's good fortune, and a series of five short films recounts the ups and downs of his life, until he met up with Hostway's marketing manager at a bar and got the Hostway job. Hidden among the entertaining elements designed to engage potential Web hosting customers with the Hostway brand, the site features a "Talk to the Hand" Web hosting plan selector and other company information. The site is intended especially to appeal to Web designers and developers, who Rattin says are jaded by all they see online, and need to see something very special in order to be impressed. "I hesitate to use the term 'viral,' since everyone says their ads are viral. But what we're doing is viral, because it's unusual, exceptional, well crafted and unexpected," Rattin said. "It's designed to connect with a core audience that Hostway speaks to, and that's Web designers and Web developers.
They're a significant part of Hostway's business, because they refer a lot of business to Hostway." This is the third such "branded event" that Hostway has done, following a "Holi-play" gaming site a year ago, and "Bob’s Cube," which launched in April. The original intent was to raise awareness of the Hostway brand in what is essentially a "boring" market, Drew Mitchell, marketing manager at Hostway, told ClickZ News. "With Holi-play, we thought we'd get some branding benefits, and maybe increase traffic to the site. We were surprised to see that the site was actually driving sales and converting," Mitchell said. "Once we had that conversion story, it was easy to sell the idea of another one." Bob’s Cube launched in April with no advertising support, and has driven over 1 million visits to the Hostway Web site and sold over 200 Web hosting plans. In total, Bob's Cube generated a 73 percent ROI, according to Mitchell. It also allowed Hostway to divert the message away from price to a more value-driven message, supported by the brand affinity it was building through the efforts.
The Bob's Cube site led to a considerable increase in traffic for Hostway, from an average of 6,000 to 8,000 unique visitors a day to more than 20,000 daily unique visitors for several months after Bob's Cube launched. Even eight months later, the site continues to draw around 2,500 daily unique visitors. It has also generated significant buzz and attention in the Web design community, as well as a few copycats, including strikingly similar sites from Netscape in May and Starbucks in July. Most of Hostway's online advertising is made up of paid search on Google, along with some search engine optimization. Since the success of these viral efforts, Hostway has reduced its spend on banners and now only keeps a presence on industry sites, Mitchell said.
NetCraft.com
December 14, 2005 Hostway Ranked Most Reliable Hosting Company Site By Netcraft
View The Article
W3reports.com
November 16, 2005 Hostway Gives One Lucky Small Business Owner's Marketing Campaign A Jumpstart
View The Article
HostingBeacon.com
October 17, 2005 Hostway and CardinalCommerce Partner to Provide Secure Online Shopping
View The Article
TheWhir.com
October 3, 2005 Four Web Hosts Top Reliability List
View The Article
TheWhir.com
September 29, 2005 Web Host Hostway Offers Intellext Tool
View The Article
BBC.co.uk
September 26, 2005 Shoppers Use Blogs for Bargains
View The Article
TheWhir.com
September, 2005 Hostway Hosting Live Webcast
View The Article
Ecommerce-Guide.com
August 24, 2005 Choosing a Hosted E-Commerce Solution - Pt. 2
View The Article
TheWhir.com
August 19, 2005 Hostway Launches Business Service
View The Article
TheWhir.com
August 4, 2005 Hostway to Hold Site Design Web Seminar
View The Article
Ecommercetimes.com
August 2, 2005 Pop-Up King Follows the Money to New Focus
View The Article
Emarketer.com
July 29, 2005 What's Needling Net Users?
View The Article
Ecommercetimes.com
July 28, 2005 Pop-Ups Top Web Surfers' Pet Peeve List
View The Article
NetCraft.com
June 8, 2005 Hostway Ranked Most Reliable Hosting Company Site By Netcraft
Hostway Ranked Most Reliable Hosting Company Site By Netcraft
For the second month in a row, Hostway receives award recognizing its high uptime and fast connection time.
Chicago, IL—Wednesday, June 8, 2005—Hostway Corporation, a leading provider of Web hosting and managed services, has been chosen by Netcraft as the most reliable hosting company site for the second month in a row. Netcraft is a respected authority on the market share of web servers, operating systems, hosting providers, ISPs, encrypted transactions, electronic commerce, scripting languages and content technologies on the Internet.
The award is based on the lowest number of failed requests and speed of connection time. The purpose of using these two measurements is to give the clearest indication of network capacity and congestions, with the least impact from the performance of the companies' own web servers.
"Our customers' number one priority is having their Web sites up and running. At Hostway, we're no different. Netcraft's acknowledgement of our reliability reiterates our drive to provide our customers 99.99% uptime," said John Lee, vice president of marketing for Hostway.
The performance measurements are taken every fifteen minutes from eight separate points around the Internet, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24-hour period. Netcraft believes that customer's place more importance on the percentage of failed requests than outages on a hosting companies' site, since this gives an indication to the reliability of routing. Visit www.hostway.com to read more about the Netcraft ranking.
Hostway has been consistently recognized as a leading Web hosting provider by online hosting resources. TopHosts has ranked Hostway as the number-one hosting provider from 2000-2005. Web Host Directory has also rated Hostway the number one E-commerce Hosting Provider for the last three years.
Ecommercetimes.com
May 31, 2005 Experts Urge Caution as Blogging Goes Corporate
View The Article
Emarketer.com
May 12, 2005 The Business of Blogging
View The Article
TechNewsWorld
May 5, 2005 Survey Shows Some Consumers Wary of Bloggers' Rights
View The Article
NetCraft
May 04, 2005 Hostway ranked most reliable hosting site by Netcraft
View The Article
InternetNews.com
April 22, 2005 Bloggers and the First Amendment
View The Article
Inc.com
April 20, 2005 Business Blogging on the Rise
View The Article
Business Week Online
April 20, 2005 Hostway survey on blogging shows generation gap
View The Article
News.com
April 13, 2005 Blog censorship gains support
View The Article
FastCompany.com
April 12, 2005 Fire Away
View The Article
TheWhir.com
March 3, 2005 Hostway Runs Third Design Contest
View The Article
TheWhir.com
February 18, 2005 Hostway Launches SiteBlog
View The Article
TheWhir.com
January 24, 2005 Hostway Adds Windows SharePoint Services
View The Article
Crain's Chicago Business
January 24, 2005 Dollar Down, Acuisitions Up
View The Article
TheWhir.com
January 12, 2005 Hostway Gets Behind PHP5 and Red Hat
View The Article
EPrairie.com
January 10, 2005 Chicago-Based Hostway Corporation Launches Operation
Donation
View The Article
