Welcome to our Blog – The Forecast is a Little Cloudy

I fully admit that we’ve been mostly a faceless company and we’ve been trying to change that – but slowly. We are working on this effort from many different angles.

One area we’ve been investing time in is to get to know our partners better. Over the past year, we’ve been more aggressive about going to trade shows, conferences, and the Microsoft campus to get to personally know Microsoft staff, vendors, and partners. Personal relationships are very important, even in a web business. These efforts have led to many new partnership deals and our first Microsoft Case Study, which took some time to get published but is live now.

You are viewing the second area of this effort and that is to provide some view into our company – beyond having some static “About Us” type of content on our website. So, we decided to start this blog.

I truly believe that we’re doing some very cool, innovative and interesting stuff here at DiscountASP.NET, and I hope to use this blog to provide us with an avenue to:

• Discuss our thoughts on the ever changing hosting industry from our niche hosting perspective
• Discuss our business strategy as well as challenges
• Have technical discussions
• Highlight any interesting news, reports, etc. that catch our attention
• Provide a look of life at a web hosting company which can be quite entertaining at times

I’ve been to those seminars and read articles and books where Web 2.0 “marketing professionals” typically tell you blogs increase website traffic, blogs contribute to Search Engine Optimization, blogs drive sales, and blogs help you reach a bigger market. I honestly don’t think that this blog will reach the popularity where we’ll see any of these Web 2.0 marketing results – though we’ll gladly take it, if any of it happens. Our main goal here is to spark some interesting conversation over forcing in some high SEO keyword density laden, promotional-sales-oriented marketing posts. We’ll just save the overt sales-driven marketing stuff for our website, press releases and advertisement.

Another thing you will notice is that we’ve chosen to blog on the Microsoft’s Live.com platform – at least for now. No doubt you’ve been hearing a lot about the latest industry buzzword – Cloud Computing. Microsoft has announced their intention to offer Cloud services with their Software plus Services strategy. This move can be viewed as a threat or opportunity to hosts, so we wanted to check out their live.com platform and keep a pulse on the Microsoft’s Cloud/Mesh evolution.

Microsoft’s Cloud service is still in its early stages so its revenue model, its functionality/feature set is a little, well, – cloudy. Even talking to different people at Microsoft about the Cloud leads to different definitions. This will be the topic of discussion in the future as it gets more defined.

For now, let me welcome you to our Blog and thanks for stopping by.

Takeshi Eto
VP Marketing and Business Development
DiscountASP.NET