A more fully-developed, unique and usable experience can bring on the next hosting revolution.

If there is ever to be a revolution in Web hosting, it won’t come by a new technology, a new feature, a new buzzword or a new business model. The revolution will come at the hands of the user experience.

While a huge portion of any given hosting provider company’s budget is spent on advertising and marketing campaigns, third-party software additions, expensive outsourced design and branding solutions, search engine optimization, affiliate payouts, etc., there are still overlooked weapons of the trade left untapped in a Web host’s potential arsenal. The industry is young, and opportunity still remains for even the newest host to carve their niche, to become a major player through a little inspiration and innovation. The best Web hosting has to offer is still yet to be offered.

One of the overlooked tools of the trade is known as User Experience or User Experience Engineering – a strategically engineered experience comprised of the sum of the user’s every interaction with the company.

Customer Experience in Web hosting does not instantly boil down to “how well our website sells,” “how happy our uptime makes our customers,” or “how friendly and helpful our customer service is.” These days, that true winning experience extends beyond all that. People have come to expect solid support, 99.9 percent uptime and a slew of features. The rest of it is no longer a given.

It goes without saying then that the Web hosting industry has a lot of room to grow in these terms. Web hosting does not have to be inherently boring. As the Internet gets more and more enmeshed in people’s lives, a website and someone to host it will become almost a necessity. People can be excited by a Web host, passionate about a new hosting idea or blown away by a site management interface. They can become attached to their host just as much as a cell phone provider. The potential is there.

User experience can be a complex endeavor and one people devote their entire lives to researching. There’s a wealth of experts and information out there as the field is growing more important to companies by the day. For now, let’s focus on some easy, common sense and cost effective ways that even the smallest host can start creating that revolutionary experience – notably, improving usability and creating a consistent experience - and then simple means to test it to see how users really feel.

Improving Usability in Web Hosting

In a recent interview with London’s The Guardian, Jakob Nielsen, a user-interface and experience guru and one of the grandfathers of Web usability, defined three modes that are impeding “good” design and harming users of the Web. He calls them “lazy, stupid or evil design.” Most of the problems we face as Web hosts in terms of usability have come in the form of “lazy design.” This means purely that we don’t actively seek out or recognize problems in the usage of services and rarely respond in pro-active measures to fix them. There is very little concern with making services naturally usable – in that any client could intuit how to use them without a heavy learning curve or extensive explication.