Charging Clients for Hosting

was curious how some of you go about charging your clients for hosting… I was thinking about the hosting fee being a percentage of the cost of the website but was wondering if anyone else does that? if so what percent?

If you are providing the client’s web hosting, you can charge whatever you like, though I would say that you should itemize it separately, as then it will make more sense to them when you send a bill the next time around (e.g. in another year).

But I also think you should give them the option to organize their own hosting—provided that the hosting account has the features you need to run the site properly.

Hello,

I wouldn’t recommend charging based on the cost of the website as it would be too hard to manage and could cause issues when cheaper websites cause a higher load on the server.

While it’s not very innovative offering a couple of different plans/packages is probably the best way to go.

Jack

The packages seem like the best option but I dont have any websites at the moment that get too much traffic since they are mostly business related… the website im working on at the moment will get alot of traffic so is there a general rule on how to price the packages or somewhere where i can see examples? I know i can look at a webhost website but not sure if that would really work out too well for figuring out the price for a clients website

I believe you also can look around and check what is being offered by other web hosting companies. You will need to have your prices competitive and that is very important to know how your competitors doing.

What is “a lot” of traffic and what kind of server load are you expecting? Will your customer need a dedicated server? Will a basic VPS be enough? Right now I don’t think that you have enough information about what your customers will need and you don’t seem to know enough about web hosting in general?

In your situation, for the time being, I think that I would pawn the customer off to a hosting company and take a referral fee. As you grow and learn more about hosting, you might be in a position to offer hosting packages yourself.

Not trying to sound harsh, I simply believe that we should focus on what we know and gradually learn so we can expand into other areas.

If you are new to this I will suggest you to start with Reseller Hosting …to get a better idea about profit and your budget you can spend for advertizement to get new customers.

For Running a hosting web site first you have know the nature and the needs of the clients then you can design the packages. Providing different kind of packages, made according to the needs attract may attract the clients.

Well there are couple of things you need to figure out before deciding rate…
what are you offering in hosting package?
What sort of customers are your target?
What sort of customer support you are going to manage?
What would be response time for technical support queries?

Kindly figure out the above given points, so you will have complete idea what should be the rate for your package…

I’m not running a hosting service… im just going to be hosting my clients websites so its easier for me to manage and maintain their websites… here are some of the packages I came up with. I might need to adjust some things with them but heres the quota, bandwidth, and price for hosting+maintenance

S1
Quota 250mb
Bandwidth 4000mb
$25

D1
Quota 500mb
Bandwidth 6000mb
$40

S2
Quota 900mb
Bandwidth 10000mb
$50

D2
Quota 1200mb
Bandwidth 15000mb
$60

How does this look?

Are these prices per month or per year.
In my \opinion you are giving very small amount of space in each plan.

I am afraid the plan offerings are too less compared to the current pricing / resource ratio offered by most webhosts outside. You would have to jackup the space and data transfer quotas or reduce your pricing.

However, you have to keep in mind that your quality of offering should not become inferior because you charge less. All the best!

i take unlimited bandwidth for 3800 dollars ($)

I believe that is called unmetered pipeline with constant connection speed.
So far a lot of people would never agree on such unlimited deal :wink:

I think , Hosting charges for 5mb is Rs.2500 + tax .

In general, you can charge whatever you want but it is probably smart to charge close to the competition. Most clients will probably cross-shop now a days so you should charge close to what other hosts they are cross shopping are charging.

Firstly you should calculate how many packages you will create under your main Reseller account. After that you can create multiple packages so that your clients get varied options to choose from. You should plan a minimum of 200% profit from the Reseller package and keep the cost of the packages accordingly. The cost of your Reseller package is also a important factor in this case.

If you really want to get into hosting your clients website, think of it as another business or service you provide for your clients and separate it from your web design service. So not to complicate matters in the future.