ahhaha - I'm happy you remembered our old conversation.
What happened back then was that I had the cheapest commercial package I could find (from ccnet - now Verio) and it cost $50/mo (for a 50 meg web site).
I called ATHM and they said they were thinking of charging $200/mo, never heard of ccnet, and only wanted to offer it to subscribers. After you and I talked, I then went on a big campaign trying real hard through emails and documentation to convince them to meet ccnet with a entry level $50 package and scale up charges as web site traffic increased. If you peg your charges to data transfer, you have a money machine that can never go broke. I also pointed out there was absolutely no need at all for customers to be wired to ATHM because you simply access and update hosted web pages through ftp from any ISP.
We were only a bit player in all this but it sure made my day when they opened the hosting service and it had everything I asked for. When I called them they even instantly knew who Verio was and what they offered.
ATHM promises to put your web site on Tier 1, fully meshed, ATM backbone with daily backups for free and 24 hour human customer support. Plus all kinds of CGI scripts, full support for FrontPage (that's me), access to raw log files, web site analysis, Web Wizard templates, web preview area, etc etc - - - ALL FOR $50!!!
The other really great thing about this is that Verio, and most of the other ISPs, are constantly having bandwidth slow-downs. This will kill your web business because irate customers will watch the server time out before it can save a submitted order.
Also, many ISP businesses are consolidating and the new central tech guys are at a loss as to what is actually happening at the remote server sites.
The perfect climate and perfect time for ATHM to come on line with web hosting.
The new customer traffic will be enormous even if it just gets around by word of mouth with no advertising. I know they will have severe support demands (eg. number of techs needed on the phone).
Remember how the newspapers laughed and ridiculed ATHM last year when they started building a large office complex?
"Where's the business?", they said.
He who laughs last ...
I see why ATHM needs the money. God knows what will happen on the support and hardware end when they decide to advertise ATHM services to the public in a big way.
I told my broker to buy a few hundred more shares.
The only critical unanswered question in my mind is how good a advertising agency ATHM will have.
We should know soon.
Do you know anything about their ad agency (or if they have one)? |
