It’s likely this has been covered time and time again, but here goes.

 

How much do you sell your reseller hosting for. Ok so it’ll depend on the site and features, but if we say the site is small scale, 5 pages or so, no database...

 

Obviously it’s hard to say how much time will be taken up by a client on hosting matters and also you need to be competitive.

 

How much do you sell for?

Reseller hosting wasn’t something I was going to get into, do I want the added responsibility I’d ask myself. Would I be just happier designing?

 

But then a few clients got me thinking, they always have a hundred question to ask, and I don’t like to disappoint so I find myself getting involved helping where I really shouldn’t, just out of good will. This is when it hit me clients (for the most part) don’t want a product they want a service. The thought of servers and databases often leaves them in bewilderment.

 

This reminded me of when I bought my last car, it was from Toyota and I remember how they no longer sold cars but services, I even had a chat with the sales cap about this. People want everything sorting for them even if this means paying more. The clients benefit from a superior service and the freelancer/company get a steady flow of continuing income.

 

New clients are good but when you look after the old ones you’ll need less new ones.

It really depends on a few things:

 

1. Your costs (hosting, support, misc)

2. What the site uses in terms of disk space and data transfer

3. What the market (your customer) will bear

All freelance designers/developers should offer client hosting, its guaranteed monthly income.

 

For web applications that I've made I charge a maintenance fee of £65/month which basically gives the client their own VPS and ongoing support (for both the application and hosting).

But what mark up would you put on that.

 

 

Let’s say you have heart internets reseller. That’s £35 a month.

Everyone you are hosting has small sites little traffic, you could just give them unlimited everything as it's going to have no impact or cost you anymore.

 

Now normally in marketing I’d think right the t-shirt cost £2 to make I'll sell for £8, £6 profit.

 

No matter how many I host (unless somewhere down the line it grows a great degree) I won’t be spending more than £35. The only thing that increases is my time.

 

I also need to keep in mind the market; I don't want to say yeah I sort that for £50 a month when other host will do it for £5.

 

 

Sorry if this looks like spaghetti it's just my thought process.

In that case I suppose it depends what you're paying for the VPS, as for what you make.

I would never offer unlimited anything because its BS in web hosting. I would split my bandwidth & disk space share up and make packages from it, based on competitors prices. I guess you could work out how much you are paying per GB etc. and make them up that way.

 

I don't know what my markup is really because its including my services in support. I own the server as well so I'm only paying for colocation and connectivity (and the overhead of the server like depreciation etc). Basically if I was re-selling something, like the heart internet package, I'd be looking to make between 40% and 60% profit. I believe that figure level is pretty standard in retail. Might sound a bit high but you have to think if you're dealing with a really challenging customer who has problems with email or something that takes you 2 hours to fix... thats 2 hours less spent on designing/developing so thats your weeks potential earnings down like £60.

Thanks Jock. That’s really helpful; I’m going to spend a lot of time making sure I get this right.