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Why My Hosting Prices Are Higher Than Most Webhosts
Yesterday I recieved an email from a Technibble reader who had seen my web hosting prices and thought they extremely overpriced. He said that he pays $6 a month and gets much more space than the $15 per month plans that I had on offer. He said he thought Technibble preaches to provide value and not fleecing our customers.
It was a totally valid email that had a good observation and Im glad he sent it. This article is about why I charged more than most other web hosts.
When you compare my $15 per month prices to what is available on the internet, there will always be hosts that provide much more for much cheaper. For example, Godaddy.com offer hosting plans for as little as $4.29.
There are many big brand web hosts our there that have hundreds of servers, all sorts of systems in place and outsourced tech support. These hosts can do it by massively overselling their available bandwith and space assuming that noone is ever going to use all of it. If everyone suddenly used all the bandwith and space their account allowed them to use, the hosts would be in big trouble. To defend against this you will usually find them pointing out something in their Terms of Service that the user has breached to get rid of them.
I set my $15 per month prices back when I did alot of professional web design work and I would handle everything for my customers. I would upload the site, set up their emails and gave them killer support for free even when the problem was no fault of my own or the servers. When I charged $15, they were damn happy that they found someone who could do it all for them. Its a simple trade of money vs. convenience.
It is my understanding that the Technibble reader that emailed me is also a technician so he already knows how to setup and run his own websites. He doesnt need all the extra hand-holding so he can get away with using $6 hosts and as technicans we love to figure this stuff out anyway. However, we need to remember that alot of other people are petrified of even attempting it in fear of making a mistake. So they would rather pay the $15 and not have to worry about it.
We need to remember that as technicians, what comes naturally to us may be incredibly difficult to someone else and that is what we charge for. Even if we just go onsite and press a few buttons to start a virus scan, its knowing which buttons to press and what process to follow that they pay for.
Its the same with my hosting prices, my clients dont know what FTP is and they dont know to set up their email accounts. Although it is only a few clicks for me to do to set up thier accounts, I know which clicks to do.
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Since when was capitalism a bad thing? We gotta love free enterprise, don’t we?
In my humble opinion, I’m going to agree whole heartedly with Bryce. There can be an overwhelming amount work that goes in to maintaining a website, let alone hundreds of them. God knows we don’t want to outsource anymore work overseas, rising cost of gas, inflation etc…
Personally, I think $15 is a bit low for an entry level hosting plan.
From what I’ve seen, the GoDaddy el cheapo specials are lacking in features like multiple email addresses or the site statistics and then they go and nickel and dime you for every little add on you forgot about or didn’t realize you’d want/need.
We charge about the same as Bryce does for our hosting. Even more when we can. :-)
I guess I don’t understand the whole “I’m not interested in making money” attitude.
Great article!
Notice how Bryce took constructive criticism, considered the perspective of the other person and then made his mind up.
Well done Bryce, bet many folks may have taken the questions personally.
It’s too easy to fire off an emotional response. Well played.
You have to understand that when you create what I like to call “ and without them. These types of blogs would never exist. I have in the past subscribe to your feed and will continue to subscribe!!
Great Article,
And the points you raised are very true.
All too often our customers (Home Users) moan about our prices,and say things like “well i could have done that” I always bite my tounge but i would love to say, so why didn’t you!!!
And in any case you called me & I never came to you…
$15 is cheap if you ask me. I will sell hosting to customers for $10 if they want to do everything themselves. If not, I will charge between $15 and $35 per month based on the customer requirements.
Do they want me to setup and maintain email accounts every month? How many employees will they be needing changes to email each month. I guess that pricing all depends on each customer, and the needs of that customer.
$15 a month five years ago was a bargain, but today everyone has control panels and all these new features all for just $4.00 a month.
We have been offering hosting since 1996 and have about 1,200 customers but our NEW customer signups has dropped significantly since the price wars started a few years ago. We have very good retention of existing clients but we do not see the spontaneous signups we used to see due to price. Offering hosting, web design, SEO and computer repair all work together to pay the bills. 3-5 years ago hosting alone paid for everything.
Nicely measured response sir.
I enjoy your email newsletters and find all of what you say to be even and fair. My hat’s off to you for this response in particular.
Cheers!
I would gladly pay more for quality service.
Its important to listen to criticism from others because alot of the time they are right. Listening to criticism can make a good technician better. In this case, this guy just didnt see it from my perspective. He was right that there are much much cheaper hosts but wasnt aware that I offered more service than other hosts. Also, for a person like myself, $6 per month per client just isnt worth doing for me.
Great post. There are a lot of people out there who wish they could do what we do. I don’t know about you all but I love what I do. It’s in my heart. There will always be those who will take shots at you no matter what you charge but if you are on your game, you will be able to put them in their place like Bryce!
We charge around the £9 ($20?) mark for our hosting. Business clients don’t want to be messing around with FTP, email setup etc they want a service provided for them.
Jamie
I think some customer willing to pay more to get better service. As long as there extra service which customer won’t get from other cheaper hosting, they won’t mind with the extra cost.
Agreed. For years we were a very low priced hosting solution, trying to do equal battle with other larger companies. However, we got customer who knew nothing about uploading, emails, and such. That then turned into full support for users who were impatient and only paying $3.95 per month. It was also a huge hassle trying to collect money from them and such. This lead to us pretty much raising the prices to weed out the lower end clients, and it worked. However our hosting business has been suffering, we market it to our business clients which appreciate the service, no matter what the cost, because they know, as with our quality IT work, they can expect the same type of quality in the web hosting aspect.
We pay an estimated $151.00 per month for a dedicated server in a very large and popular data center. You have to make up the over head somehow, right?