“WE NEED DATA” . . . (Part II)

Here is what we learned from providers offering both free and paid SSL certificates.

5 Insights about DV Certificates

• Commercial websites want to look more professional & trusted with commercial SSL
• Warranties for websites are a motivating selling point
• Having SSL in the checkout flow increases conversions and Average Revenue Per User
• Commercial clients want to be compliant with security
• Renewals continue from website owners because they don’t know about the free option

“Free SSL certainly has its place on the interwebs, but as a web hoster who enjoys profits, commercial support, and continued renewals, SSL is a big part of my business.” – Anonymous Partner

5 Insights about Content Delivery Networks (CDN)

• Automation is required for website owner adoption (changing the Domain Name System, or DNS, is difficult)
• Offering a CDN provides customers with instant gratification
• Value proposition is easy to communicate (speed + SEO)
• Lack of revenue share makes current offering a challenge
• CDNs enable security features such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection

“...there was some talk with Cloudflare, they're like, well, what's up with the revenue share here? We're sending you all these people. And their response was, well, you know, we're the only game in town.” – Anonymous Partner

6 Insights about Malware

• Threats exist but are lessened by implementation of network-level protection
• Immunify360, CSF, and Sitelock, are the three most popular solutions
• Scareware tactics are frowned upon by most hosting providers
• Threat detection, upsells during checkout flow, and remediation, result in higher revenue
• Current server solutions provide zero customer management / visibility
• Unpatched open source applications are a bigger problem than Malware alone

“The customer doesn't necessarily have any control (when malware is found)... if they want to delete malicious files or things like that they can't - which is a problem for server level malware tools.” – Anonymous Partner

5 Key Insights about Web Application Firewall (WAF)

• A WAF is ideal for eCom / WooCommerce based customers
• Hosting providers findit difficult to commercialize up-scaling for shared hosting customers
• Hosting providers would incorporate within the higher tiered plans
• A WAF reduces churn from less experienced website owners that are not concerned with security
• Having higher security on servers results in operational cost savings higher security on servers

“I get so tired of the alerts from their software. You can probably shut it off somewhere at the same time I'm busy with other things.” – Anonymous Partner

5 Key Insights about Backups

• Competition includes R1Soft, DropMySite, Acronis, and local cPanel backups
• Control-panel-based backups often degrade server performance
• Hosters advertise an included backup service that refers to a server-level backup
• Offsite backups with client level control would increase the value of their hosting
• Easy restores are just as important as easy backups

“We back up for disaster recovery purposes. We don’t back up to recover customer sites. We tell them we will do our best effort to recover them, but it’s not something that we advertise.” – Anonymous Partner

We’ll be the first to admit that not all of our initial thoughts were right, and based on the research we did with 48 hosting providers, hours of interviews, and even more time analyzing the data, we were able to successfully launch the Sectigo Web Security Platform.