41–48 of 48 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What kind of websites are they?
Feels like a question I should have asked as well. $150 p/m per site seems exorbitant.
$150 surely includes 1 hour of billable time. For many, this is in the $50-100/hour range (though higher isn't unheard of), so this seems pretty reasonable.
Yes, I charge for hosting and support, especially for smaller clients who don't want to know or care about hosting. It means I can do quick fixes and answer questions without either if us having to worry about billing. I don't make a lot from it, but enough to be worth the trouble. For example, there's a couple of local businesses that I set up single-page sites on github pages. They pay me $25/month, mostly to answe…
What's your hourly rate? $25/month doesn't give you much room for it to be profitable.
I look at the local sites as a bit of local pride/civic duty - if I didn't do it then they'd either have crappier, more expensive sites or else no websites at all.
(I also have a full-time salaried position now that effectively pays about $60/hr. So I don't really have to worry about income at this point.)
My town is only about 2000 people, and most of them dont need a website. I figure I'd be getting the same questions either way, so I might as well get paid a bit ;)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feels like a question I should have asked as well. $150 p/m per site seems exorbitant.
Not for a managed hosting with 1-3h of allocated maintenance work plus HA guarantee. It's cheap, for that level of service. Either you want cheap mass hosting, then you have to live with support that can only assist you with basic stuff (and most don't have any support other than FAQ pages), or you pay more and get support that can actually help you. For example, a hoster I know, when you go to them even with the mos…
Yes, and i'm not cheap. I have 2 HA clusters with 2 different providers, with sync and failover between the 2 sites. I also have DO as an emergency fallback / overflow. I manage and maintain everything for our clients. My cost is about $500 per month for 6 machines in total, 16CPU/64GB RAM/25TB SDD per machine. My minimum monthly charge for hosting a site is $150 for a simple site, $300 for something more complex, an…
What kind of websites are they?
I think that it's good to be on retainer, but I didn't find that providing hosting was worth the effort. A few hundred dollars here and there was not enough. If clients needed technical assistance, then they could pay a retainer or an hourly rate. Example scenario to consider: if you're providing hosting, and the site gets hacked, and you're the webmaster, you have to clean it up without pay. If you manage a lot of s…
What you say is true; I learned, and am still reminded of it, the hard way from time to time. But it's nothing more than a problem waiting to be solved. In my case I'm solving this problem by using static sites and managed web hosting. Put simplicity where simplicity is due and segregate the more complex requirements. Static sites are going a very long way now, and a lot can be done with JavaScript on the client-side…
I think that it's good to be on retainer, but I didn't find that providing hosting was worth the effort. A few hundred dollars here and there was not enough. If clients needed technical assistance, then they could pay a retainer or an hourly rate. Example scenario to consider: if you're providing hosting, and the site gets hacked, and you're the webmaster, you have to clean it up without pay. If you manage a lot of s…
Well, it wouldn't be without pay as you'd be paid for the hosting. If they all get hacked, that'd be on you for not taking preventive measures for it, right? The positive point is that it's easier to avoid being hacked than it is to fix it after the fact. Hosting it would be a passive income, which should typically be preferred, isn't it?
I was part of a larger marketing / design agency where they charged standard vendor markup (15%) on hosting (which was a reseller account with cpanel), which was cheap for the clients but did not cover the costs of passing along support requests to the actual hosting company.
That agency went out of business 5 years ago and I absorbed the hosting business. All of the sites are WordPress and I had built an optimized stack along with automation for backups, updates, security scans, etc. For the changeover I set 3 levels of hosting power and rolled in the automated maintenance, domain name renewal and storage of backups. Email and SSL are add-ons provided by 3rd parties and marked up at least 100%.
Prices are $50, $150 and $500/mo.
The stack has changed over the years from a shared VPS to individual VPSs to docker containers. Everything is behind a load balancer / caching proxy so changing out the platform as needed was/is pretty painless when we find new ways of doing things.
All clients were required to enter into a new contract with monthly recurring CC billing or they were provided with their files and thank you for your past business letter. Every new site proposal includes the first year of hosting and maintenance, and is a hard requirement. I won't support a site that's on some $5/mo hosting plan running PHP 5.3 or who knows what. I can tell horror stories for hours, which just reminds me how much I don't want to live through them again.
We lost 1/3 of the customers, but I think we only needed 3 clients to equal the revenue of the previous system. For example, there's one client that we're charging $650/mo (with emails and multiple SSL domains) that was NEVER charged for hosting by the previous company. I was sure they were going to bail, but their support load previously was so large that we needed SOMETHING to justify keeping them on. Amazingly now that they know that when they break things there is an actual cost to picking up the phone to call us. They do have X hours per month of "free" support but then they have to start paying $100/hr. The new stack almost guarantees that breaks don't occur from our end and if we do, it's 30 seconds to flip over to a previous backup.
We've also gotten a few redesign jobs simply because they see our name on their credit card statements every month. I've personally never worked with these clients during the time of the previous company, but they came along way back when and would've gone with someone else if we weren't already in a relationship, no matter how loose.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To this I say educate them.
The danger with that is you educate yourself out of a job.