Feb 1 Launch: Toll-Free Numbers, Online Faxing, Virtual Numbers

[VOIPoTim]

Mirrored from the HostGator Forum:

We’re pleased to announce that VOIPo will be launching on February 1st with a trio of services as outlined below. The full line of services including Residential VoIP Service and Hosted PBX Business services will be phased in shortly after the initial launch.

Once all services are launched, you will be able to resell virtually ANY VoIPo service under your own brand and get the services from us at wholesale with a VOIPo reseller account.

The following services will be launched February 1st:

Toll-Free Service

With our Toll-Free service, you’ll be able to get a toll-free number and have it forward calls to any US or Canadian phone number or SIP address.

Estimated Pricing:

$4.95/Month (Paid Monthly)
$2/Month (Paid Yearly)
100 Minutes Included Monthly
Additional Minutes Billed at 4.9 Cents


Virtual Numbers

With this service, you’ll be able to get phone number from nearly 6,000 locations throughout the US and point it to your existing US or Canadian phone number or SIP address.

As an example, if you are in Dallas, you could order phone numbers from New York City and Orlando and have them both point to you in Dallas. This is especially useful if you want to have local numbers in areas your customers are in.

Estimated Pricing:

$4.95/Month (Paid Monthly)
$2/Month (Paid Yearly)
500 Minutes Included Monthly
Additional Minutes Billed at 1.9 Cents


Online Faxing

With VOIPo’s fax service, you'll be able to get a fax number which allows you to receive faxes in your e-mail.

When something is faxed to your fax number, it will be converted to a PDF file and e-mailed to you automatically.

Estimated Pricing:

$4.95/Month (Paid Monthly)
$2/Month (Paid Yearly)
100 Faxes Included Monthly
Additional Faxes Billed at 25 Cents

Here are some demo screenshots for the initial services:











More info will be posted as it is available. We look forward to working with you in the coming year and providing you and your customers with world-class telecommunications services.

[usa2k]

If I read correctly, these are all incoming minutes referenced below.
None of those services function as outgoing.

My 1-877 number I have (from elsewhere) the remaining 7 digits match the wife's cell phone.
That was an extra fee ($20 I think) to choose a specific number.

I do like that it will work a-la-cart versus only for a VOIPo line
(Vonage/Packet8 toll free were for Vonage/Packet8 lines when I used them.)

[VOIPoTim]

Yeah, the target for this is really HostGator customers looking for standalone services. It's a very low-support offering that will help us get things up and running and build our support staff working out any procedural items with support before we go all out.

When this launches, we will be offering live phone support for the BETA as well.

If I read correctly, these are all incoming minutes referenced below.
None of those services function as outgoing.

My 1-877 number I have (from elsewhere) the remaining 7 digits match the wife's cell phone.
That was an extra fee ($20 I think) to choose a specific number.

I do like that it will work a-la-cart versus only for a VOIPo line
(Vonage/Packet8 toll free were for Vonage/Packet8 lines when I used them.)

[fisamo]

For the tollfree number, what options will be made available to customers? Specifically, choosing the destination number or SIP address is a given. However, I could envision customers wanting the ability to accept or block, at their whim, calls from pay phones--block due to the cost, accept due to the flexibility/'emergency use' capability or for business reasons. If payphone calls can be accepted, how much will they cost? Will they always cost extra (e.g. $0.50/call added to your bill, whether or not you've used all of your 100-minute bucket, or will a payphone call lasting one minute result in an 11-minute deduction from your monthly bucket?
Second question: What is passed along as CID? Will you pass along ANI (no option for the calling party to block)? Will you pass along the tollfree number, so the called party knows that the incoming call is on their tollfree line? Will there be any other method of notifying the called party that the call is coming in on the tollfree line? (Aside from messing with the CID, I don't know how the service as you've proposed it could notify the called party/subscriber that the incoming call is on the tollfree line.)

Third question (mainly to be obnoxious) : If you point an incoming tollfree number to a VOIPO Express number, will the incoming minutes be charged against both numbers?

I really like that price point for a minimal-use customer--$24/year to have an incoming tollfree number that gets less than 2 hours/mo usage is reasonable.

Will the virtual number option allow you to set up a voicemail box with wav-to-email forwarding, or will it be strictly a forwarding service? As with the tollfree service, is there any way the subscriber knows which number is dialed to make their phone ring?

[N9MD]

I'm reluctant to ask, being a naturally shy and retiring person --- but how will those of us who are not VoIP resellers (not "in the business") be dealt with by VOIPo? Not harshly, I hope.

It would be hard for me to peddle VOIPo service to people who are deeply sedated for their colonoscopies.

What generosity can we expect as non-resellers for our Main and Virtual VOIPo numbers -- and TF and/or FAX numbers?

[VOIPoTim]

I'm reluctant to ask, being a naturally shy and retiring person --- but how will those of us who are not VoIP resellers (not "in the business") be dealt with by VOIPo? Not harshly, I hope.

It would be hard for me to peddle VOIPo service to people who are deeply sedated for their colonoscopies.

What generosity can we expect as non-resellers for our Main and Virtual VOIPo numbers -- and TF and/or FAX numbers?

For the services outlined in this release, it'll be available to HostGator customers and anyone in this BETA at that pricing. Just slightly higher for the public.

Residential pricing I'll post in the very very near future.

In general, we wanted to fill the gap with a reseller solution because there is nothing good out there. There's nothing that focuses on the real entry level reseller. With HostGator, we lead the pack for the reseller hosting market, so it's logical for us to do the same for VoIP and basically have an instant reseller base (we have about 45K resellers at HostGator) overnight.

With that being said, we'll also be offering a direct service as well just as we do for HostGator, so I wouldn't worry too much about it. Some people say the industry is getting crowded, but look at web hosting.... We alone have 45K resellers and that's a small piece of the industry. Now think about how many more people need phone service vs those that need hosting. It's a huge market and from our perspective there's very little competition in a lot of niche areas. Mass marketing is a little harder because of the cable cos, etc... Not impossible, just more expensive.

We feel that overall the total HostGator customer base (about 1 million domains hosted) will serve its purpose to shave our "mass marketing" costs, the HostGator resellers are jumping up and down waiting to resell the service so that end is covered.

Then we hit some niche areas with licensing deals (working on closing a deal potentially worth about 600K/yr for our Hosted PBX system now), apartment complexes, etc. This is the stuff we want to focus our marketing $$$ on since it has the biggest returns.

If the core areas are basically taking care of themselves and we focus on the niche areas, that puts us in a whole different playing field.

I have no problem playing in the lower end residential market as long as we can adequately maintain quality service. I'm just not willing to spend a fortune on marketing there when I can spend the same money marketing in higher impact areas.

At the end of the day though, none of this matters if we don't have a quality service, so the direct residential product will certainly be under pretty constant development.

[N9MD]

Thanks for your very informative response.

As an alpha-user who is in VoIP as an avocation rather than vocation, I must thank you for allowing me to participate in the VOIPo adventure. It has been a most interesting experience to watch how a "new startup" progresses from an idea to a full blown product -- and a marketing strategy.

Tim, not only have you and your team been responsive to your alpha-users' comments, requests, concerns, and critiques -- but you have given us a fascinating inside look at the process itself ... most delightful. Thanks!

[VOIPoTim]

Well, I think at the end of the day, it really just boils down to the fact that we're all people. There have been some good days and bad days, but it's all part of the process.

It's easy to hide behind things especially since we're service-based and not retail or anything where we have to have customers face-to-face. It's easy to put nice PR spins on things, hide debt when you're privately held, etc.

It's very easy to brush things off because let's be honest, what's the worst thing that can happen to a lot of companies short-term for ignoring things? Maybe some chargebacks? A gradual loss in revenue? Short-term nothing really happens. At the end of the day though, that's just like quicksand though and ultimately, the business will fail long-term.

I guarantee that we'll have our share of problems, outages, and issues. While I think we've pretty much always had a working dialtone with almost no actual service outages in BETA, you guys have seen some internal turmoil with staffing, etc. No matter what, all companies have problems and we're not immune. HostGator is not either.

I've got a "friend" Alex who provides support sometimes and makes status names under a fake name because it's not "proper" for the owner of a company to be involved with that portion of a business. It would look bad....

I'll admit I used to agree with that to an extent, but you should question it looking bad by who's rules... Once people just make the decision to move forward and do what they feel is the right thing and what would create the best possible outcome rather than worrying about things like that, that's where things really start to happen.

What's really so bad with people being genuine and involved? That's something I wonder about every day when I deal with a lot of companies. No, we can't be involved with everyone

My biz partner and I have more passive income coming in monthly than 90% of Americans make in a year (his from HostGator/investments, mine from online marketing and investments), but we're entrepreneurs at heart. We like to build, create and grow. We also don't like to lose. At the same time though, we're both very involved with what we do. If we were doing this just for the money, it'd be a little different. Yes, we intend to cash out long-term, but it's definitely not our motivation. For him it's HostGator...for me its VOIPo.

We're both building to be building...if we built something offering poor service, it's not going to meet our own expectations and really just kind of deflates the satisfaction in general and we let ourselves down.

Again, that's not to say that we won't have problems...because we will. I'm just saying it's all perspective and different people deal with those problems differently. In generally, I think most people in life try to do the best they can within their belief systems, perspective on morality and abilities.

That's what we try to do, and at the very least we're living up to our expectations and being true to what we want to do. It's not always going to the generally accepted path, but if compromise it, what do we really have going?

Thanks for your very informative response.

As an alpha-user who is in VoIP as an avocation rather than vocation, I must thank you for allowing me to participate in the VOIPo adventure. It has been a most interesting experience to watch how a "new startup" progresses from an idea to a full blown product -- and a marketing strategy.

Tim, not only have you and your team been responsive to your alpha-users' comments, requests, concerns, and critiques -- but you have given us a fascinating inside look at the process itself ... most delightful. Thanks!

[fisamo]

As long as all your problems aren't users' ISP related and upstream-provider related, you'll be OK in the end.

Sorry, it's been a long week, and sometimes I need to vent, too.

Now on the serious side. I also appreciate the journey--at the very least, it's been nice to have a few free DIDs and channels to play with on my own * system. But it's also been good to help build a service from the ground up with the ability to provide feedback from a user's perspective very early in the process.

I'm really hoping for some good, low-cost options (for low use, at least in the near term--seems like Express will meet the need) with the option to build up/add services as I see fit. I don't know as if I'd take on a VOIPo line as primary at this time--there are a few options that I would like to have that you haven't developed yet (phone-based control panel--ability to program/activate/deactivate CFWD over a phone, for example), and you'd have to prove yourselves in a production environment before I'd put the WAF at risk...

[NY Tel Guy]

As long as all your problems aren't users' ISP related and upstream-provider related, you'll be OK in the end.

Sorry, it's been a long week, and sometimes I need to vent, too.

Now on the serious side. I also appreciate the journey--at the very least, it's been nice to have a few free DIDs and channels to play with on my own * system. But it's also been good to help build a service from the ground up with the ability to provide feedback from a user's perspective very early in the process.

I'm really hoping for some good, low-cost options (for low use, at least in the near term--seems like Express will meet the need) with the option to build up/add services as I see fit. I don't know as if I'd take on a VOIPo line as primary at this time--there are a few options that I would like to have that you haven't developed yet (phone-based control panel--ability to program/activate/deactivate CFWD over a phone, for example), and you'd have to prove yourselves in a production environment before I'd put the WAF at risk...

Sniff.....all of this mutual admiration stuff is making me cry....