As the world continues to celebrate the inauguration of the 44th US President Barack Obama, we’re all feeling the spirit of change in the air.  It doesn’t seem to matter where you live or what your personal politics are, there’s enough inspiration to be found for us all.

When we watched President Obama’s speech on the morning of the 20th, it was hard not to be impressed with the man.  He has an air of confidence rarely seen, even among the distinguished ranks of our world leaders.  As an orator, he had the world hanging on his every word.  There’s a sense of honesty there, of transparency.  A belief that he will unite the people for a common cause and will succeed where others have not.

Alright, enough gushing.  The reason I brought this up is to talk about a single word that drives everything we do at Hosting Nation.  That word is transparency.

I bring up that single word today because it’s been my belief for some time that transparency is something all businesses should aspire to, but few seem to embrace.  The need to be transparent in our dealings with the citizens of Hosting Nation (past, present and future) is a fundamental part of our vision and our mission.

It’s a tough sell.  There’s a lot of competition out there offering products and services that seem amazing and incredible.  Packages are unlimited, unmetered and at times, (we think) unmanageable. We wonder how it’s possible for companies to offer thousands of Gigabytes of bandwidth to shared hosting users when we know that dedicated servers peak out at about 3 terabytes (that’s 1024 gigabytes) and that overages are subject to additional fees.  We know that most dedicated servers have, at most, 1 or 2 Terabytes of diskspace so don’t know how other companies are able to offer shared hosting plans with diskspace in the hundreds of Gigabyte range.  Don’t get me started on unlimited plans.

I say I don’t know how they can offer it, I should say I don’t see how they could honour it.  How they offer it is loosely based on a principle I learned a long time ago called breakage.

Breakage works like this.  Essentially, a web hosting company will offer you amounts of bandwidth and diskspace that they know you won’t use.  If you do use it, they often have a clause in their TOS about “reasonable and fair usage” or “unreasonable CPU usage” so they can shut you down.  Best case scenario, a few users will go over a predetermined (usually undisclosed) amount and the web host does some fancy load balancing to make sure everyone stays up.  At worst, many people go over bringing the server to a screeching halt.

Here’s an example of how breakage works.  Let’s say that you own Sophie’s Widgets.  You sell a specific type of widget, but you’re having a tough time breaking into the market, so you decide that everyone who buys one of your $50 widgets gets 3 days and 2 nights in Las Vegas.  Sweet deal right?

The catch is that the Vegas trip is only available if you book it within a year.  And you have to pay for airfare.  But hey, airfare’s cheap.  Then you discover that you can only stay if you check in on a Sunday through Wednesday, and not on holidays.

What ends up happening is that only a small percentage of people who get the certificate are actually able to use it.  The Vegas trip only costs you if someone decides to use it.  So now you’ve sold 1000 widgets, making $50,000.00  Only 100 of the people who bought widgets were able to get to Vegas (that’s unusually high, but I’m making a point), which cost you $300.00 each for the rooms (that’s $30,000.00).  If the widgets cost you $10 each to make, you’ve still made a clean $10,000.00 and 1000 new clients.

Let me put it another way.  A burger joint claims to make the biggest burger within 100 miles.  They say that if you can eat the burger, it’s free.  If not, you have to pay for it.  The burger, if you have to pay for it, costs $40.00 (it’s REALLY big).  It costs maybe $10.00 to make.

500 people line up for the challenge.  2 of them actually manage to finish it off.  At $40.00 a pop, the restaurant has MADE $14,400 and only LOST $20.00.  (Actually, chances are they didn’t lose anything – as the 500 people trying to eat the bigger burger also brought friends who ordered other food.)

I know you’re all wondering exactly what this has to do with Hosting Nation, and I’m about to get to it.  There’s a reason we don’t offer unlimited or unreasonable amounts of bandwidth and diskspace.  Are you ready for it?  Transparency.  We’re prepared to provide you with every single byte of diskspace and bandwidth that you pay for in our Hosting for Everyone plan.  5 Gigabytes of Diskspace and 50 Gigabytes of Bandwidth.  We know that everyone on our shared servers could use that and we’d stay running.

We also receive and post real-time server reports from Hyperspin.  We want you to be able to check uptime so you know for a fact that we run at 99%-100% uptime, all the time.

Want to know more?  Visit www.hosting-nation.com for complete details on our hosting packages and current promotions.