MYOB now hosts sites – but when will it offer hosted MYOB?

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 12 May 2008 11:28

Opinion and Analysis

Payroll, retail and accounting software solutions provider, MYOB, has entered the web hosting market with hosting and email packages after the recent purchase of a web hosting business. While this is a good move, it’s clearly still early days, with a hosted MYOB solution to come “in time”.

Claiming to be the “host with the most”, MYOB says their move into the online services sector through “business grade web hosting solutions” will “pave the way” for MYOB’s back office management systems to integrate with small business websites.

But what does this mean without all the business and tech jargon? It means that MYOB now offers domain name registration services, email hosting and web hosting at a “business grade”, guaranteeing a “commitment to uptime” – pretty much like any other business oriented web hosting company.

Sure, MYOB can go on about being “customer centric” with 365 day support, but major business web hosting companies have offered the same thing for years, and plenty more.

Nowhere does MYOB make any mention of helping small, medium and large businesses without a website actually learn how to make a website in the first place. While one would imagine that all large businesses already have a website, if not medium businesses too, small businesses are still much more likely to be in the category of business without any specific online presence beyond an email address.

So, by simply offering web hosting, MYOB is not offering help with the hardest part of all – the actual construction of a web site with an associated ecommerce engine and database that can be easily updated by the customer, without that customer needing to constantly go back to a web developer for updates.

This immediately puts MYOB in competition with any web developer out there, who either already offers their own hosting solutions, or simply uses one of the big Australian or overseas web hosting companies, each with their own guarantees of uptime, etc etc.

Now, if is interested in getting into the web design business, it’s not saying so anywhere that I can see, but even if they aren’t, their online marketing material doesn’t make any recommendations or suggestions on where to go if you need a website created – which you probably will if you’re likely to be a customer of MYOB’s new hosting solution.

After all, if you already have a successful website, you already have a good hosting solution, and unless they haven’t been performing, why move it all to MYOB who have only just started in the web hosting business, despite all the promises of commitments to uptime, hourly backups and all the rest?

So, what is good about MYOB’s new web hosting service, what else is it missing, and what about MYOB’s other accounting solutions actually going live in an online service like Salesforce? Please read onto page 2.