I'm trying to put together a bundled hosting/development package.

Aside from initial web development of their sites, I'm looking to setup a long-term hosting solution with my clients.
Until now I have just been offloading them to other local ISPs for hosting, and only hearing from them when trouble strikes. A friend of mine inspired me to take the initiative and just start doing the basic hosting myself and bundle it with maintenance and other services for a total package approach.

Now, there are basic hosting plans out there that you can get for under $10.00, but you are getting what you pay for with most of those (If you are reading this and run an under $10.00 hosting platform...please don't take offense.).
So let's only consider hosting environments with unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, Professional backups of files and data, 24 hour physical server access at the data center, BPG4 routing over several DS3s and professional firewall config. This is not a P2 laptop in my garage over DSL.
(The company I work for owns an ISP and massive datacenter, so I get my servers hosted for free.)

Now I'm only looking to host websites and databases. I don't want to touch email hosting or FTP.

I also want to bundle this hosting with up to 1 hour a month of website design / tweaks / changes / maintenance.
I also want to throw in a free banner ad on my search engine.
Finally I want to provide very basic SEO and marketing for them. No more than an hour a month.

So my question is, if you were a small business owner what would you pay for these services?

In a nut-shell you will get:
Domain Name & DNS Config
Server Hosting w/ unlimited bandwidth and file size (no email)
DB Hosting
1 Hour a month of site development and backend programming
A banner ad on a local search engine
Basic SEO

EDIT:-----------
This may not be the best forum for this topic.
If it needs to be moved sompleace else, please feel free.
/EDIT---

(The company I work for owns an ISP and massive datacenter, so I get my servers hosted for free.)

So what happens if they terminate your employment?

waveshoppe wrote:

(The company I work for owns an ISP and massive datacenter, so I get my servers hosted for free.)

So what happens if they terminate your employment?

I have to start paying them for the server hosting.

Hmmm I would make sure you get that in writing from them. When working relationships sour all bets are off.

waveshoppe wrote:

Hmmm I would make sure you get that in writing from them. When working relationships sour all bets are off.

Understood.

So what would you consider fair pricing for the service I want to offer?

I really cant answer that. My worst experiences were with premium and dedicated hosting, honestly hostmonster has been a good experience for us.

A lot of hosting problems don’t necessarily stem from the host. Even if the host is close to the backbone, you still have to get to the host and dealing with 3rd party outages and re-routing by individual ISPs can be a real pain.

waveshoppe wrote:

I really cant answer that. My worst experiences were with premium and dedicated hosting, honestly hostmonster has been a good experience for us.

A lot of hosting problems don’t necessarily stem from the host. Even if the host is close to the backbone, You still have to get to the host and dealing with 3rd party outages and re-routing by individual ISPs can be a real pain.

Fair enough.

shrevesearch.com wrote:

So my question is, if you were a small business owner what would you pay for these services?

In a nut-shell you will get:
Domain Name & DNS Config
Server Hosting w/ unlimited bandwidth and file size (no email)
DB Hosting
1 Hour a month of site development and backend programming
A banner ad on a local search engine
Basic SEO

EDIT:-----------
This may not be the best forum for this topic.
If it needs to be moved sompleace else, please feel free.
/EDIT---

A. How much actual space? Not bandwidth, actual web space in the program?

B. 1 hour web development? I'd go with at least 5 - I'd spend an hour just figuring out what they want...

C. Email? Erm... any professional website is going to want to have domain email... so what? They have to go elsewhere? This isn't exactly a competitive advantage in the hosting game....

D. Banner ad on a local SE? whazzzat? If it doesn't provide traffic there's no point...might as well give them Google AdWords... as those are worth something at least.

E. Basic SEO - 1hr/month - much like the web dev, not sure what exactly you can do with an hour/month... heck, the beginning phase; Keyword research can take 6 plus hours... so they'd have that in 6 months? Not sure it's relly worth anything.....


Anyway, if yer hosting...then look at the competition and find your competitive advantage from their packages (and being able to have company emails is HUGE). What is the average pricing on competitors for the same packages?

As for other packages with bells and whistles, do that as a secondary package.... I wouldn't really force the bundled packages on them.


Hosting is a very competitive market - peeps care more about space/bandwidth and CHEAP than anything else... sad, but true. Reliability is the real selling point...or should be... but most peeps don't think of paying for a valuable service....

TheGypsy wrote:

shrevesearch.com wrote:

So my question is, if you were a small business owner what would you pay for these services?

In a nut-shell you will get:
Domain Name & DNS Config
Server Hosting w/ unlimited bandwidth and file size (no email)
DB Hosting
1 Hour a month of site development and backend programming
A banner ad on a local search engine
Basic SEO

EDIT:-----------
This may not be the best forum for this topic.
If it needs to be moved sompleace else, please feel free.
/EDIT---

A. How much actual space? Not bandwidth, actual web space in the program?

B. 1 hour web development? I'd go with at least 5 - I'd spend an hour just figuring out what they want...

C. Email? Erm... any professional website is going to want to have domain email... so what? They have to go elsewhere? This isn't exactly a competitive advantage in the hosting game....

D. Banner ad on a local SE? whazzzat? If it doesn't provide traffic there's no point...might as well give them Google AdWords... as those are worth something at least.

E. Basic SEO - 1hr/month - much like the web dev, not sure what exactly you can do with an hour/month... heck, the beginning phase; Keyword research can take 6 plus hours... so they'd have that in 6 months? Not sure it's relly worth anything.....


Anyway, if yer hosting...then look at the competition and find your competitive advantage from their packages (and being able to have company emails is HUGE). What is the average pricing on competitors for the same packages?

As for other packages with bells and whistles, do that as a secondary package.... I wouldn't really force the bundled packages on them.


Hosting is a very competitive market - peeps care more about space/bandwidth and CHEAP than anything else... sad, but true. Reliability is the real selling point...or should be... but most peeps don't think of paying for a valuable service....

All points well taken.

I'm not really looking to bring on a whole bunch of hosting traffic.
I'm trying to give my existing clients (mostly web stuff these days) an easy way to get their changes made as well as provide me some residual income.

I dont want to get into all the headaches of hosting, but just want to offer a complete package to clients I do work for already.

Edit, I decided I would host their email too.

Do you know how much they are currently paying for hosting?

Are you doing web work for them? If so do you probably know what host they use, and can judge from that what they are used to paying, non?

Nic wrote:

Do you know how much they are currently paying for hosting?

Are you doing web work for them? If so do you probably know what host they use, and can judge from that what they are used to paying, non?

They pay 20-40 a month for the hosting they get right now.

shrevesearch.com wrote:

They pay 20-40 a month for the hosting they get right now.

Can you offer the same level of service for slightly cheaper and still make a profit?

If so, i would try that- people will switch over if:

1) they can save
2) they don't have to do anything (you take care of the switch)
3) it doesn't inconvenience them or their sites (much)

I actually have a hosting company... but in reality it is but for my clients that have crappy hosts. Over the years I grew tired of working on crappy servers and hearing of downtime/poor customer support.

Our packages start at $10/month and up...while we have packages, it is often adapted to the clients needs.

Now, while we don't offer any bells and whistles in the form of SEO or Web development... our (hosting clients) know that this hosting company has;

Web developers on staff
SEO peeps on staff
Close customer support (cause we're the peeps ya deal with)

Because our hosting peeps generally know of us from other efforts... it works as a catch-all solution (ie; they get hosting,web development and SEO from one place). This does seem to work out in that each service interests existing clients in the others.

This sounds like a direction that would work from what I can tell....