Verio Targets SMB Market with Hosting Solution

Web hosting company Verio launched a new offering today aimed at serving SMB customers that are looking to scale the scope of their online capabilities incrementally over time.

Verio’s Advanced Business Hosting solution represents an amalgam of two hosting approaches the company uses: Shared hosting, which is less expensive yet enables less sophisticated functionality and performance, and more advanced enterprise-grade hosting fueled by Verio’s virtual private server technology.

The new solution will allow Verio’s channel partners to target SMB customers that today have modest online needs, such as hosting a static, information-only Web site, but want to scale their operation over time as they grow, adding e-commerce capabilities and multimedia.

“Our resellers have been using our high-end technology to create Web sites for customers, yet our small-end users had this need to buy a product that would grow with them,” explained Steve Renda Sr., vice president of global sales and marketing at Denver-based Verio. “We put these two ideas together and repurposed high end tech and brought it downmarket.”

The new offering eliminates the need for customers to migrate from a shared hosting environment to the more complex virtual private server solution as their needs for Web hosting and other online capabilities expand, Renda said. He said it’s essentially letting partners provide the performance of a high-end Web hosting solution with the simplicity of shared hosting.

“SMBs have a major aspirational approach to Web sites,” he added.

Verio currently has 5,000 resellers in its partner program, with about half of those deemed active by Renda. The company is on target to add 500 new partners this year, he added.