Business Intelligence for Web Hosting

Web hosting Industry/Web hosts powers the world wide web. It is the major backbone of all that runs on the internet. The industry consists of companies that are primarily offering infrastructure for hosting and data processing. It is a huge and fast-growing industry forecasted to touch $204.6 billion by 2024. Thus, business intelligence for Web hosting is very important, which is currently being overlooked or ignored at the moment by the business owners.

With the experience working with few datacenters and web hosting clients, it was noticed that they still maintain their data in the traditional manual methods and also use the limited analytics provided by the helpdesk/billing software that they are using. Considering the humongous volume of data, they possess, there will be lots of valuable information about their business in those dark data, which if utilized in the right manner will be providing valuable insights to grow their business further.

Web hosting Industry/Web hosts powers the world wide web. It is the major backbone of all that runs on the internet. The industry consists of companies that are primarily offering infrastructure for hosting and data processing. It is a huge and fast-growing industry forecasted to touch $204.6 billion by 2024. Thus, business intelligence for Web hosting is very important, which is currently being overlooked or ignored at the moment by the business owners.

With the experience working with few datacenters and web hosting clients, it was noticed that they still maintain their data in the traditional manual methods and also use the limited analytics provided by the helpdesk/billing software that they are using. Considering the humongous volume of data, they possess, there will be lots of valuable information about their business in those dark data, which if utilized in the right manner will be providing valuable insights to grow their business further.

Importance of Business Intelligence

This can be explained with a small example. A subscription-based web hosting Company, was getting around 100 inbound leads every month. One month they did a marketing campaign and generated 200 leads that month. Of which 175 was converted. Seeing the success of these campaigns, they started giving similar marketing campaigns frequently and the sales kept increasing. The senior leadership was quite impressed by the marketing team’s performance. However, in the annual evaluation, it was noticed that the revenue had not increased in proportion to the sales conversion. The sales, marketing, operations and finance teams were asked to bring their historic data to the senior leadership to analyze what went wrong. On deeper analysis of the data from each of these teams, it was observed that the leads that were generated were converted. However, the clients churned in the following months as the product was not suited for them. The leadership finally identified that the root issue was with customer retention, as the leads that were generated were not valid leads and hence the higher churn rates within 1 to 2 months of usage.

With this example what we understand is that, the following items were missed:

• Organization did not have track on the monthly increase or decrease in revenue. Which if they had tracked, this discrepancy would have been identified early on.
• Organization did not have track on the customer churn rate nor the customer retention rate. Which is also a very crucial metrics that directly impact the revenue.
• Sales or Marketing did not have visibility into the churn or retention rates.
• The marketing team did not perform a market study or segmentation. The campaign was targeted at the wrong audience. Right data study on customer behavior would have helped.
• Revenue was wasted on incorrect marketing strategy. Which could have been identified early on and avoided.

This example clearly shows that with constant monitoring of your company vitals, data-driven decisions can be taken early on to avoid problems and work smartly. Rather than believing in the rule of thumb, let numbers do the talking. This example shows the importance of business intelligence for web hosting or rather for any industry.

How BI can help you

The importance of business intelligence has been at an increasing trend in these last few years. However, there are still many organizations who are not tapping their data potential fully or even partially. This data if rightly analyzed, the insights that they give on the historic, present and future trends of an organization will be invaluable. This analysis not just gives insights into the organization’s growth trajectory, but also, equips to take the right data-driven decisions at the right time. Also, the real-time insights help in identifying bottlenecks in operations, sales, support & finance departments. Thus, making the daily operations smooth for each of these teams.

With the current trend in data democratization, we need to spread a data driven culture within the organization. By data empowering the team, for every meeting your team can come prepared with the right analysis, as they already have the data to analyze their work and performance. Data does not rest in the hands of a few, but everyone has the required data analysis they need for taking well informed decisions for efficient work execution.

Unlike other industries, where a single ERP solution manages the entire functioning of the organization, web hosts normally depend on multiple applications to handle the billing, sales, support, helpdesk, livechat etc. Hence, making it difficult to analyze the data that rests on multiple tools. They tend to utilize the limited data analysis provided by those tools. Which often fails to corelate data and provide the right analysis. If all this data can be consolidated and brought to a single platform and analyzed it makes more meaningful insights. This is where pre-canned dashboards that take data from multiple sources can be leveraged.

Conclusion

As a conclusion, the significance of being data-driven is very important for any organization. The webhosting industry being a subscription-based industry and using multiple tools, has humongous data that’s untapped. Hence, they need to be leveraging the power of data to get informational insights, to steer organization to growth. This clearly shows how important Business Intelligence is for Web hosting.