Offering hosting in my web development packages?

dfarrelly96

Hey guys, I'm starting as a freelance web design/developer and I am thinking about maybe including a a domain name and hosting in my prices.. My reasons for this are that I have come across a lot of people who have already purchased hosting and often times they choose terrible hosts, some of them also paying for more than they need and not even realising, so I just think it would be easier for them if I picked their hosts and also I would be able to stick with someone I know is good, and I wouldn't have to be working with a bunch of different host..do you think this would be a good idea or not?

Graham

You're going to be ok getting calls at 11pm on a Saturday night?
You're always going to be able to respond quickly to hosting issues?
You're not planning to be uncontactable during holidays, family occasions etc etc.
You're going to provide a better service than their current hosting?
You're going to sell this by competing on price?
You're going to increase your monthly revenue by about the price of 2 cups of coffee, per customer, per month.
You're absolutely off your rocker.

*Personal opinion only, YMMV. The above assumes you're talking about small-scale customers.

dfarrelly96

No I don't actually mean to host the sites myself, I just mean to include the price of say a years hosting from a hosting provider such as siteground in my pricing..

Graham

dfarrelly96 wrote: »

No I don't actually mean to host the sites myself, I just mean to include the price of say a years hosting from a hosting provider such as siteground in my pricing..

I gathered that. You will still be the first point of call if you're the one selling hosting. Personally I wouldn't touch it with the remote end of a very long stick. Not worth the hassle for the pennies it will generate in revenue.

Unless of course you've got 190,000 customers and you're making a margin on each one. In which case, ignore me.

dfarrelly96

Yeah I guess you are right, So I should just suggest good hosting providers to my customers then.

Haha if only..

Trojan

As Graham said, you're the first point of contact for hosting issues - including potentially email - which is often mission critical. Website downtime is usually slightly less critical, unless processing a lot of orders.

IMO, unless you're doing it at some scale, it's just not worth it.

uck51js9zml2yt

You could suggest some providers to clients and charge for installing the site.
You could even help them purchase the hosting but make sure you stipulate in writing that the provider is responsible for when things break down as it will.

Maybe have A maintenance fee setting out a fixed number of hours per year of support , response times etc but make what's covered and not covered airtight.

devildriver

dfarrelly96 wrote: »

Hey guys, I'm starting as a freelance web design/developer and I am thinking about maybe including a a domain name and hosting in my prices.. My reasons for this are that I have come across a lot of people who have already purchased hosting and often times they choose terrible hosts, some of them also paying for more than they need and not even realising, so I just think it would be easier for them if I picked their hosts and also I would be able to stick with someone I know is good, and I wouldn't have to be working with a bunch of different host..do you think this would be a good idea or not?

It all depends...

All of the advice above has merit. It can be incredibly time-consuming and unless you are charging it correctly it can actually lose you money and time.

I host 95% of my client's sites. Those that I don't host have proven the most troublesome for a number of different reasons, badly configured servers, cheap shared hosting, over-zealous security etc.

The hosting company I work with are a known quantity, respond quickly to support tickets and are generally really solid and reliable. However they are not cheap so if you are going down this route make sure to invest in a quality hosting service. If you go cheap you will end up being in the middle of demanding clients and an unreliable service.

Email will be the biggest pain for you as you will be expected to configure all of your client's devices and inevitably there will be clients whose technical knowledge even for basic setup will be very poor. That can be a huge time waster.

So when pricing your resold hosting you have to be realistic in how much you charge. Forget about trying to compete with the cheapest shared hosting providers. Many of your clients will have seen the fiver a month hosting plans and think that is what hosting "should" cost. If you are going to offer a service where they can call you when problems arise or where they expect instant support for their email/ server issues then you need to price accordingly as they will not get that level of support from a shared-hosting provider.

So if you approach it with some thought and realistic pricing it can be a good source of profit and recurring income.

Hope that helps.

zig

The Pros:

• You get total control over the server which can be very very handy, including using the likes of GIT for production environment (although this assumes you are managing the server yourself)
• Not looking for access or details every time you need to do something
• You don't get blamed by the hosting provider if something goes wrong that isnt your fault

The Cons:

• If you're using a provider, if there is an issue it is out of your hands but its your responsibility
• Worrying about email
• Little to no margin
• If its a serious website,and not just a WordPress site and you need to provide a really good quality service then you are most likely in over your head should something go wrong
• You are committing yourself to being the clients service provider while at the same time making no money from them
• If you're outsourcing you've to manage a pile of hosting accounts where in reality its easier if each client worries about their own

Talisman

Poor support is the biggest reason why clients change service providers. Providing excellent after sales service will provide you with customers who will sell your business for you and bring you more customers.

This doesn't mean fixing their issues at 3:00AM, there is an element of that but helping the client to help themselves can pay off. Teach them to do simple tasks for themselves and provide them with the information to retain the confidence in themselves to do tasks when you're not available. You will empower your customers and in the process they will be confident that by choosing you they made the right investment for the future of their business.

If you want to take the "that's not my problem" route then you aren't going to be providing a service.

Don't be afraid to charge for your time either - if clients become accustomed to you giving them freebies they will begin to assume your time and services are free.

Leverage free services. BitBucket provides private Git repositories and if the client wants a functional mail system Zoho offers 25 mail users with 5GB of storage. Git is very handy for keeping a clean backup of a website including the database.

EIREHotspur

Graham wrote: »

I gathered that. You will still be the first point of call if you're the one selling hosting. Personally I wouldn't touch it with the remote end of a very long stick. Not worth the hassle for the pennies it will generate in revenue.

Unless of course you've got 190,000 customers and you're making a margin on each one. In which case, ignore me.

I am going to retrun the favour to Graham down the years and dissagree with all of his points in his first post....

Stick to the Top Hosting companies for hosting and none of those problems crop up....The Top companies do this for a living and have backups in place....Servers ARE their Business.

I have never had a problem in 15 years and actually never do websites without hosting them with my web hosting.
That way I can always ensure I get paid as I can turn off a website quickly.

devildriver

EIREHotspur wrote: »

Stick to the Top Hosting companies for hosting and none of those problems crop up....The Top companies do this for a living and have backups in place....Servers ARE their Business.

I wouldn't say from my experience that problems NEVER crop up but you will have far less problems with a quality hosting company.

Also it's worth going with Managed hosting if possible, that way you have an extra level of assistance and support.

EIREHotspur wrote: »

That way I can always ensure I get paid as I can turn off a website quickly.

And that is a MAJOR benefit in controlling the client's hosting.

seamus

devildriver wrote: »

And that is a MAJOR benefit in controlling the client's hosting.

Yeah, but for the most part you're talking about clients who don't know enough about web hosting anyway. So if you don't get paid they won't have either the savvy or the forethought to lock you out of their control panel. So you can always remove your code.

It's a tiny benefit in reality - as the hoster you will have to deal with chasing yearly or monthly renewals for both domains and hosting, on which you'll be making little or no profit. Which in itself is a hassle for one or two clients, it becomes a horrible timesink with five or more clients.

It's far more likely that a client will "forget" to pay you the €50 for the year's hosting, than the €500 invoice for web work. What are you going to do? Keep turning off their websites? Yawnfest, hassle, money pit.

It also means that if/when the client gets someone else in to do work on their site, you don't become a glorified IT department trying to explain to their wife's brother's best mate's nephew what an FTP client is and how to upload files to the server. It's not your hosting, so it's not your problem.

Unless you have a company that is will to pay you a large yearly retainer for your services to include hosting and domains, then as a web developer you do not want to get involved in all that crap. You will find very quickly that a significant chunk of your time becomes dealing with hosting issues - be that billing or creating new email addresses - and less and less about just developing.

devildriver

seamus wrote: »

It's far more likely that a client will "forget" to pay you the €50 for the year's hosting, than the €500 invoice for web work. What are you going to do? Keep turning off their websites? Yawnfest, hassle, money pit.

Yes if you are trying to compete down at the "50 quid a year" end of the market, it is a colossal waste of time.

That's why I said you should only consider hosting your client's sites IF you charge properly for it. And that means working out a reasonable profit margin over and above your server costs and time.

And of course you have to invoice them properly too. There should be no option to "forget" to pay!

The initial setup of the server is where all of your time will go. However after that presuming there are no major issues each subsequent year's hosting fee is passive income.

As I said above email setup and management is the big timewaster and if possible I recommend getting the client's to switch to Gmail Pro or Google Apps for Business or whatever they call it now.

This allows the client to directly manage their emails and aliases and as they are paying Google directly that's where they have the support relationship.

It's hard to compete with Google anyway especially when your clients need 20gb IMAP mailboxes x 20 addresses.

EIREHotspur

devildriver wrote: »

Yes if you are trying to compete down at the "50 quid a year" end of the market, it is a colossal waste of time.

That's why I said you should only consider hosting your client's sites IF you charge properly for it. And that means working out a reasonable profit margin over and above your server costs and time.

And of course you have to invoice them properly too. There should be no option to "forget" to pay!

The initial setup of the server is where all of your time will go. However after that presuming there are no major issues each subsequent year's hosting fee is passive income.

As I said above email setup and management is the big timewaster and if possible I recommend getting the client's to switch to Gmail Pro or Google Apps for Business or whatever they call it now.
I don't chase monthy payments....it isn't the cost of a holiday in the Bahamas...yearly billing with a reminder a month before it is due..
This allows the client to directly manage their emails and aliases and as they are paying Google directly that's where they have the support relationship.

It's hard to compete with Google anyway especially when your clients need 20gb IMAP mailboxes x 20 addresses.

Agree with this.

After all Seamus.....who is running your Business....you or your clients??
You setup recurring billing and they get sent a reminder.....no payment...website goes down.
If they query me I explain to them that I have to pay my bills on time and been burned by clients in the past not paying me.
If they are not good with that then I don't want or need the hassle of chasing them down.

devildriver

EIREHotspur wrote: »

Agree with this.

After all Seamus.....who is running your Business....you or your clients??
You setup recurring billing and they get sent a reminder.....no payment...website goes down.
If they query me I explain to them that I have to pay my bills on time and been burned by clients in the past not paying me.
If they are not good with that then I don't want or need the hassle of chasing them down.

And just to add.

Bill annually, automatically and in advance.