Running a web hosting business requires of you, as an owner, to monitor a lot of industry-specific metrics in order to identify your strengths as well as areas to improve. Of course, you may try using some default reporting or SaaS analytic tools, but this can still be insufficient. You need powerful web hosting reports to ensure your company’s stable growth.
As MetricsCube was designed to offer such web hosting oriented analytics, we have come up with a few reports that are pretty intriguing but you might have never heard of before. Until now!
1. Services With Domain Ratio
This report indicates how many services in your system have an active domain attached. A pretty obvious metric for a web hosting company, right? Well, based on our internal research, it looks like hardly anyone ever tracks this information. Which you should certainly do since this report is a great indicator of how well you are doing with your domains sales. For example, if the amount of services with assigned domains is low, think of it as a source of business potential that has not been explored yet.
Not only that, but in MetricsCube we also provide another report, measuring the similar value but from a different angle: Domains With Services Ratio. Yet another chance to figure out if you are hitting the target and work out a new strategy to sell even more services with tons of customer domains.
2. New Services Income Ratio
Let us move to something equally practical and time-saving. This report will tell you how much of the total service income comes from the newly purchased services specifically. Remember that the value of this metric will heavily depend on the strategy your company has been acting on. If, for instance, you rely on monthly services and offer extra discounts for clients on their first subscription, do not expect some colossal numbers to pop up here. The second factor this report takes into account is the billing cycle. This one is pretty simple to grasp: the ratio will be much higher for annual billing as the initial payment covers 12 months upfront.
So how does this report translate into practice? Provided that your churn is relatively low, you may consider your company to be prospering well if you reach:
- 50%+ of new services income ratio for annual services
- 5%+ of new services income ratio for monthly services
And trust me when I say that this report is of massive help since we use it ourselves for keeping track of the product sales growth in other businesses we run. On a side note, if you are interested in monitoring income from your domains in a similar way, MetricsCube has got you covered as well with the New Domains Income Ratio report.
3. Services Lifetime
And… another report related to services – the driving force of your web hosting venture. This one has been designed to let you calculate average lifetime of a service (measured in days). Personally, I highly recommend to compare multiple products to get a holistic perspective on your offer and see right away how various services perform when matched against one another.
Who knows, maybe by doing so you will hit on a real gold mine that in the long term will bring you more money that you would have thought? Why not invest more marketing efforts into it then?
From my personal experience I also suggest to keep an eye on Average Revenue Per Service which is closely related to Services Lifetime, but much more appealing as it supplies you with more tangible numbers – the income. In MetricsCube you may also find similar reports, but for domains: Domains Lifetime and Average Revenue Per Domain.
4. Renewal Reports
A group of web hosting reports that should also ring a bell. But to our surprise, it not always does. Many companies keep a regular track of their churn but not renewal – which, basically, are like two sides of the same coin. Plus, renewal reports provide an additional, valuable perspective on your actual earnings.
How many of your subscriptions were renewed for another period? How much income did they generate on a daily basis? How many clients decided to stick to your services for longer? All the answers are right here, because instant overview of your company’s dealings is one of the most powerful aspects of MetricsCube.
5. Active Subscriptions vs Active Paid Subscribers
Not every business analytics tool allows you to follow up on your active subscriptions in a straightforward way. We made sure MetricsCube does, by introducing several reports dedicated to this very metric.
One one the most tricky things about active subscriptions is that they include only services billed in a regular way. On top of that, it is a good idea to compare those values with the rate of Active Paid Subscriptions so that all free services could be excluded from the report, thus giving a more reliable insight into your real earnings.
In this example you may see that the number of subscriptions is much higher than the number of subscribers. What does it mean? That some of the existing subscribers have purchased extra subscriptions OR new subscribers purchased multiple subscriptions.
Similarily, MetricsCube allows you to study the contrast between Active Subscribers and Active Paid Subscribers. Both reports are extremely handy when it comes to comparing the average amount of recurrent services paid by a single client.
I hope you made it till the end of this article and, more importantly, that it broadened your knowledge about web hosting business analytics at least a bit. As you can see, there is a whole lot of different metrics that you can measure, compare, interpret and integrate into your long-term business tactics. Today I chose five web hosting reports that in my honest opinion still don’t receive the proper attention, even though they can become the key to your business growth. And the good news is – you can tap into every single one of them in MetricsCube!
Feel free to also explore my previous guides on other must-know reports in the industry:
