Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 48 posts

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

#21

Post by Clubber »

mgkimsal wrote: post #6

I'm generally surprised when people don't . The few people I know who don't justify it with "I don't want to have to deal with all that support" (can't quite figure out what "all that support" covers). "When people have an issue, who do they call?" "Me" "So... they're already calling you. Why not have some $ for that to cover it". "I just tell them to call the hosting company". It baffles me how those folks stay in b…

Absolutely. As a general rule, never work for free, period. Not only will you not get income, but your business clients won't respect you or your product.

I mean it's ok to include a week or two to fix bugs that you might have missed, but be up front about that window and make sure that you differentiate bugs with features. Clients might blur that line.

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

#22

Post by qrbLPHiKpiux »

mgkimsal wrote: post #6

I'm generally surprised when people don't . The few people I know who don't justify it with "I don't want to have to deal with all that support" (can't quite figure out what "all that support" covers). "When people have an issue, who do they call?" "Me" "So... they're already calling you. Why not have some $ for that to cover it". "I just tell them to call the hosting company". It baffles me how those folks stay in b…

I see both sides of it. The end consumer is getting nickel-and-dimed from "support" from every angle anymore. You need to put "value" into support and make them feel, as they should, getting their money's worth out of it.

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

#23

Post by JoshMnem »

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 sites, and they all get hacked because you put them on one server, then you get to clean up a lot of sites without pay. It's better to get paid hourly for those kinds of things.

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

#24

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

I only ever delivered static pages, so my solution was to throw it on S3 and charge them 1.5x whatever the Amazon bill was. (Slightly fancier formula; that's the basic idea.)

(Okay, I actually usually went CloudFlare -> S3, because it wasn't much more set-up, but really drops the bills on static content delivery with a lot of caching.)

Automatic security by experts, minimal configuration on my part, and easy to hand-off when clients wanted someone else to take over. (Also, since it was in an AWS account I controlled, it meant I retained control of the website until they paid me -- never came up, but it never hurts to have leverage.)

I never made much off of it, but it wasn't a negative on my cashflow and kept a lot of clients in contact with me -- "Well, we wanted this new page and since you're the one running our website, let's just use you!"

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

#25

Post by slice_of_life »

slice_of_life wrote: post #14

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 syste…

Don't get why the downvotes. Still gonna kick ass.

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

#26

Post by ncouture »

JoshMnem wrote: post #23

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 with modern browsers.

In many cases no back-end services are needed, but when they are, it can make a lot of sense to segregate them in a way they can power multiple sites with the same functionality requirements.

It's really up to the needs you have but in the end I feel it can really be worth it.

Heck, latest web standards let us componentize elements, we might all be better off with a global database that contains all of them in JSON or YAML format which we can load/dump from and that contains some kind of ACL (ala Firebase can do that).

Have a good day.

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

#27

Post by jolmg »

JoshMnem wrote: post #23

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?

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

#28

Post by gt2 »

Daviey wrote: post #7

When i dabbled in this area, most of the lower end work was surprised there was an ongoing need for hosting. Either directly or their own provider... They thought that once it was bought, it just 'ran' on the internet.

To this I say educate them.

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

#29

Post by CharlesW »

jwdunne wrote: post #11

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…

> You are a web design business…

Another way to look at this is that you're not a web design business (your perspective), you're a "solve my online problem" business (customer perspective). Yes, you're designing a web site, but in the service of increasing sales, improving discoverability for their potential customers, etc.

It seems like you intuitively know this, in which case the "extras" are potentially a distraction, but also an opportunity to bundle services into an ongoing "subscription".

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

#30

Post by jolmg »

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…

Why was this downvoted?
Post reply on HN