Quote Originally Posted by N9MD View Post
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.