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Class Acts: School-Year Deals By Michelle Megna
September 5, 2006
It's back-to-school time, and college professor Jonathan Meersman, also CEO of Hosting Spot, Inc., is teaching Web companies a valuable lesson: an altruistic campaign can pay off. His company is now offering free Web hosting accounts to students, an offer he reinstituted after a successful launch last school year.
Faculty members nationwide told their students about the deal, which Meersman created with the idea that the students will continue to be customers once they are done with their education. He says that this strategic initiative allows his company to grow and serve a wide variety of customers.
Hosting Spot was founded in 2003 by Meersman, a college professor who teaches a variety of Web design and development courses. He was looking for an affordable, all-inclusive, third-party Web hosting option for his former students who wanted to start their own Web Sites. He believes that part of the learning process for students is to experience the same service that a third-party company offers in the real world. Hosting Spot was founded to meet this need, but it continues to grow by servicing clients in the public and private sectors. To support its growth, Hosting Spot converted from a sole proprietorship to a corporation last year.
There is a one-time setup fee of $10 for the free account, but it's credited back to students who upgrade their accounts later on. Meersman says the nominal fee allows him to verify that the new account is legitimate and not being created to use his servers to send junk e-mails.
Students can visit www.HostingSpot.com/student to sign up, or for more information. Educators who wish to learn more can visit www.HostingSpot.com/educator.
HostingSpot.com, headquartered in Delavan, Wis., specializes in services for small businesses, including real-time credit transactions using the industry-standard 128-bit SSL encryption. The company also manages Windows, UNIX and ColdFusion servers as well as MySQL databases and uses a variety of industry-standard development languages.
A Host of Deals: More Discounts In other seasonal hosting news, AIT, a Web-hosting and domain-registration company, announced it is discounting hosting packages by 40 percent to help businesses prepare for the busy holiday selling season. The savings are offered to customers who pre-pay for six or 12 months and sign up for AIT's fully managed Business and Reseller plans, or the basic self-managed Dedicated option.
The pre-pay offer caps a busy month at AIT, which has included the introduction of security tools, the beginning of pre-registrations for "dotMOBI" domains, an expansion of the company's dealership initiative and a Web design discount to prepare e-commerce-businesses for their peak season. "Next month should bring forth even more new products," said Clarence Briggs, ATI CEO. "We have several new items ready to roll off of the research and development assembly line to facilitate virtual conferences, bill collection and security."
Hot for Teacher: Online Courseware In other scholarly news, Atlanta Ga.-based MindIQ just released Design-a-Course eCommerce (DaCe), a software package that lets businesses or individuals profit from their expertise by allowing them to set up online courses.
With the DaCe system, anyone with subject matter expertise can open up their own turn-key e-learning business. DaCe includes authoring software, a hosted "Learning Management System (LMS)," and credit-card processing. Packages begin at $500 and also include one private, secure URL which includes one test-student account and unlimited e-commerce student accounts.
Making the Grade: Take Advantage of Dorm Munch-fests with Online Ordering Finally, if you own a restaurant near a college, you can capitalize on today's wired students by offering online-ordering.
O-Web Technologies, an interactive design and marketing firm that specializes in Web site design, restaurant online-ordering systems, e-marketing, e-commerce and custom software applications, reports that one of its clients is seeing online orders almost 40 percent higher than its average call-in order.
Rascal House Pizza just launched an online ordering system and reports that the average order is in the range of $27 to $30, nearly 40 percent higher than the average phone order. Furthermore, online pie-hounds are twice as likely to come back as the average phone-in customer. The company is counting on the new system to help owners better manage their increased business as colleges and universities reconvene in the next few weeks.
Customers tend to return to the site because of its inherent convenience. Aside from not having to look up a phone number and sit on hold, the site automatically gives each customer the option to quickly repeat previous orders. Retaining order history also allows system operators to customize direct marketing efforts to each shopper.
"If a customer ordered a veggie pizza in the past, the system suggests something similar when they come back," explains Niko Frangos, vice president of Rascal House Pizza. "This isn't just blind marketing to a diverse customer base; we're able to cater toward what they're actually interested in. We're not just interested in sales, but also knowing our customers. These tools make it possible."
Rascal House plans to continue to market the system through in-store promotions and all major mailings, but the online system will also return the favor. Future marketing plans will use system-stored information for special e-mail campaigns that will target specific customers' personal food preferences. New revisions of the software will also utilize specialized artificial intelligence technology for smarter up-selling of new menu options based on trends in each customer's ordering patterns. Sounds like a great way to channel all those dorm dollars to your business.
Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.
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Rethinking the Datacenter
Putting the Green into IT
Managing the Modern Network
Evaluating Software as a Service for Your Business
Is Your Disaster Recovery Plan Good Enough? 
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