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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?

#31

Post by ddingus »

Yes, I have. Not currently doing this work.

As a client, I won't actually do business with anyone who doesn't understand the need to fund those activities.

They will get swamped and fail, or the work will degrade and potentially fail as almost nothing works in a vacuum.

At a minimum, funding staying current, dealing with changes, dependent system changes, and the communication needed to make it all work will generally exceed the margins made on new projects.

If the goal is to make money and keep some of it, a retainer, or maintenance plan is needed.

Or, the expectation of paying time and materials on all post project work needs to be there, and it needs to be lean, no hassle.

My current arrangement is like this. Not quite enough to warrant a retainer, but enough that it needs to be paid for, unless I want my partner to starve or be unavailable to me when I need them.

Bundling hosting into this is a no brainer. They know that host well, you can always move, and it's efficient.

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

#32

Post by juddlyon »

You can purchase a managed VPS that runs cPanel and run dozens of marketing sites on it. My server cost $120ish and I collected $300ish - it was an extra $2500 a year in my pocket. I rarely had issues, and if I did, I contacted support to assist me.

However, I started another business and no longer wanted to be in the web hosting game. Migrating clients to new hosting was a nightmare and it ate into my profits. It's very hard to charge for a migration when you initiate it. Getting them to sign up for new hosting, handling DNS switchovers, etc.

YMMV. Another option is become an affiliate of a couple of your favorite providers. Learn their set up really well and refer businesses to them.

As for ongoing maintenance (security updates, content tweaks, form testing), HELL YES. Small recurring contracts are awesome. They make for better websites since they're being tended to, and it's a nice little stream for you once you have several of them going.

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

#33

Post by chrishn »

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…

Interested, how do you come to these prices?

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

#34

Post by jwdunne »

CharlesW wrote: post #29
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 distract…

Yes. The thing with hosting and email is that it adds overhead in an area that may not be a core competence.

You could spend a few hours fixing someone's email because they decided to bulk mail using your servers. That or they get hit by malware that does the same.

Those few hours would be better spent building websites.

It's a good complementary service but my warning was about drawing the line when it starts to encroach on what you do best. We have learned this the hard way.

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

#35

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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…

Even if they don't want to deal with the headache they can probably hire someone to handle it for less than they money they would take in for most 'support'. I mean most support issues are going to be small, anything big or difficult can then be a new piece of business.

on edit: if handled right it's almost like found money.

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

#36

Post by halfeatenpie »

A fairly sizable percentage of our product line is web hosting. Of course to note we started out as a hosting company and people focused on infrastructure.

I'd say hosting is a good way to retain clients and to continue to work with them. It's great for clients as well since we do host their website and if problems happen then we can help them fix it. The hosting fees are actually packaged "for free" to our maintenance fees which includes very small changes (text changes and minor updating). Major changes would be considered a new project.

Regarding time investment, our maintenance is almost none as most of our infrastructure code has been developed and put on autopilot including monitoring. There are minor blips we do have to worry about and handle, but overall everything works. We also have a person on-premise (inside the datacenter) who helps us with quick turnaround to hardware or physical problems.

Biggest time investment is working with the client directly on their projects.

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

#37

Post by ephimetheus »

I was thinking about doing that multiple times, but I always figured I didn't want to be liable if anything goes wrong with their stuff. Especially business e-mail is an area I would avoid at all cost, you don't want to be involved when the suits can't write e-mails anymore. All support I provided was billed hourly, and that was lucrative enough for me.

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

#38

Post by Cozumel »

gt2 wrote: post #28
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.

The danger with that is you educate yourself out of a job.

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

#39

Post by bdcravens »

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's your hourly rate? $25/month doesn't give you much room for it to be profitable.

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

#40

Post by bdcravens »

Cozumel wrote: post #38
gt2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To this I say educate them.

The danger with that is you educate yourself out of a job.

In my experience more educated clients are better clients.

If your service can be so easily taught, you're probably not providing much value.

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