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Ask HN: Do you charge your webdesign clients for ongoing hosting and support?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you charge your webdesign clients for ongoing hosting and support?

#11

Post by jwdunne »

We use it to subsidise our hosting fees and time to keep things up to date. It's often more convenient to control the website when doing online marketing work.

Changes may be a flat monthly fee, free as part of a larger retainer (if simple) or ad-hoc pay as you go based on amount of work.

It's not a lot and doesn't form a big part of the business but helps provide an all-in-one solution for clients who typically have no idea where to go next.

One thing we are winding down and I urge you to avoid is email support. It's simple to set up but you can quickly get overwhelmed by the amount of support involved. Email is often a fundamental to business, depending on industry, and it should be treated as such. We suggest clients use Gsuite. This leads to my final point.

You are not a hosting company, unless you pivot that way. You are not an email provider. You are a web design business and you should not let hosting overwhelm the core of what you do. Be ready to cut it off if it distracts too much from your core.

Re: Ask HN: Do you charge your webdesign clients for ongoing hosting and support?

#12

Post by nfriedly »

heythere124 wrote: post #10
nfriedly wrote: post #8

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 would you do with smaller businesses when you decide to quit/retire and they need to take control of their own websites?

I'd help them find someone else to transfer responsibility to.

Re: Ask HN: Do you charge your webdesign clients for ongoing hosting and support?

#14

Post by slice_of_life »

I had been doing the hosting with 3rd party providers but I realised that I could actually do it better myself if I built a multi tenant platform. For the support, I was doing a lot of the support anyway so I realised I might as well do it in my own platform.

For these reasons, I've deployed my app on a Vultr server, have a couple of clients on it for my beta and so far so good.

I'm still working on the billing system for my clients so that when they renew their hosting the next time round it will be on my platform.

A couple of things I didn't want to touch include domain selling and email hosting. My platform has turn key ecommerce tools that are good enough for customers to want to pay for. Domains are still done by a 3rd party (but they're mostly cheap) and as for email, I would rather provide integration with Zoho or google apps. I don't like the headache of email deliverability; it's not worth the effort at this stage in my startup - heck, even Shopify don't touch it.

Once I'm done with billing, my next big problem to solve is logistics. I need to find a way to help my merchants ship to their customers easily as it is still a very big problem for them. It will mean partnering with a myriad of logistics providers and creating an ecosystem for just this.

Re: Ask HN: Do you charge your webdesign clients for ongoing hosting and support?

#15

Post by mdekkers »

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, and most of my clients are at $500. This includes 1/2/3 hours support/site changes respectively, and dealing with security, patching, speed, uptime etc.

If you can build something like above and keep it running, it is a nice money-maker.

Re: Ask HN: Do you charge your webdesign clients for ongoing hosting and support?

#16

Post by slice_of_life »

jakobbuis wrote: post #3

Yes. Definitively yes. If you're a typical web developer or agency, you're going to have a lot of one-off engagements, project and campaign websites. Those cost money to support, and your customer should supply that money. We never host without both a modest hosting fee, and a SLA for fixes, updates and perfective maintenance.

> SLA for fixes

Very curious how you price this...per fix or standard monthly fee? If it's a fee, how do you deal with absurd feature requests whose development costs far outstrip what you've quoted?

Re: Ask HN: Do you charge your webdesign clients for ongoing hosting and support?

#17

Post by spacetexas »

mdekkers wrote: post #15

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?

Re: Ask HN: Do you charge your webdesign clients for ongoing hosting and support?

#18

Post by slice_of_life »

spacetexas wrote: post #17
mdekkers wrote: post #15

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?

Feels like a question I should have asked as well. $150 p/m per site seems exorbitant.

Re: Ask HN: Do you charge your webdesign clients for ongoing hosting and support?

#19

Post by cubano »

slice_of_life wrote: post #16
jakobbuis wrote: post #3

Yes. Definitively yes. If you're a typical web developer or agency, you're going to have a lot of one-off engagements, project and campaign websites. Those cost money to support, and your customer should supply that money. We never host without both a modest hosting fee, and a SLA for fixes, updates and perfective maintenance.

> SLA for fixes Very curious how you price this...per fix or standard monthly fee? If it's a fee, how do you deal with absurd feature requests whose development costs far outstrip what you've quoted?

> If it's a fee, how do you deal with absurd feature requests whose development costs far outstrip what you've quoted?

You make it painfully clear in the original contract that all changes and features requests require additional cost quotes.

Re: Ask HN: Do you charge your webdesign clients for ongoing hosting and support?

#20

Post by mschuster91 »

slice_of_life wrote: post #18
spacetexas wrote: post #17

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.

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 most hipster tech stack imaginable, they'll educate themselves on said technology and will help you until the app is set up successfully.

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