Bayanhosting Aims to Grow Local Hosting Market

Aug. 25, 2012 - PRLog -- Local web-hosting company and domain registrar Bayanhosting Corp. has launched a new campaign to convince Filipinos that the products it offers are as good as those of industry giants anywhere in the world.

Established in 2004, Paranaque-based Bayanhosting quickly developed a reputation among its small but faithful clientele for innovation, regularly beating out the local competition when it came to adopting the latest hosting technologies. But significant growth in the client base for all Filipino hosting companies has so far been elusive.

“The biggest hurdle to creating a thriving hosting industry in this and most other countries has been the aggressiveness of a few major players, particularly in North America,” explains Simon Ward, an Englishman who joined Bayanhosting as CEO last May. Ward has worked in the Philippines since 1998, running web-based communications for an agricultural sector.

“Rather than focusing on generating new clients for their hosting businesses, these aggressive players found it more profitable simply to buy out competitors and absorb their clients,” Ward explains. “As a result, millions of people who registered domains with one company now find themselves registered with a different company altogether.”
No company better exemplifies this industry consolidation than market leader GoDaddy, based in the US. Of some 210 million domain names registered in the world today, no fewer than 50 million are registered with this one company.

Now Bayanhosting is looking to buck this trend and build a sizable domestic clientele by showing Filipinos that when it comes to web hosting, “local” can be just as good as “imported”.

“Of some 27,000 domains currently owned by Filipinos, fully 40% are registered outside the Philippines,” says Ward. “And most of the websites associated with those domains are also hosted by foreign companies. It doesn’t need to be like that.”

“Many will switch when they learn that top-notch services are available locally. We will always have the edge in such aspects as ease of payment, and ease of communicating with sales and technical support staff, including in Tagalog.”

“So there are two thrusts to our expansion campaign,” he explains. “The first continues our tradition of pioneering state-of-the-art products in the Philippines. Just this month we have become a certified CloudFlare hosting partner, improving security and speed for our clients’ websites, for free! And our newly expanded range of SSL certificates is now comparable to offerings normally associated only with the biggest international hosting companies.”

“The second is, simply, marketing. Bayanhosting always had the products. The problem was people didn’t know. That’s going to change.”