What do you expect from a host?

Andrew,

From a host's perspective, I will give you some advice.

Since you are reselling, your primary concern should be making your pricing *at least* equal to what your host charges you. You have to make money or you won't be around to help out your clients in the first place.

Once you know how much you *have* to charge, you need to start looking at a number of things:

Who do you want to compete with? Hosting prices range from free to several hundred dollars with just about everything in between. Hosts do good for a number of reasons. There are the hosts that do good because they charge virtually nothing for their services. They probably won't be in business long. There are hosts that offer more than they can for a reasonable price. These guys also won't be in the business long. There are hosts that charge reasonable prices for reasonable services. They will be in business for a long time. And there are those that overcharge. They will probably be in business for a while too, because they do get business. Hosting is an extremely feirce market.

What *can* you offer? If you can't offer advanced features, you don't want to charge for them.

What is your target market? Are you targeting small personal sites? Small mom-and-pop businesses? Medium business sites? Large corporate sites? E-commerce sites? Fortuen 500 sites? All of the above? Some of the above?

You can't ask people what they want in terms of packages because a lot want everything for nothing. A lot of people are reasonable though and when they make suggestions, listen to them because they are usually things you want to look at. *You* need to create your packages based on what you want and need. You need to know how much profit you want, how much your operating costs are, how much you are paying your host, etc. etc. etc.

To wrap it up, I am glad that you are getting into the hosting market - it is a lot of fun (given you do it right). Just make sure you do what *you* need to.

Chad,

Thanks for your reply.

Well, what range of price d you consider as cheap and expensive? That's what I'm not really sure about. For example, Host X provides 200mb, 8GB bandwidth for $14.95 per month while Host Y provides all that for $29.95. Do you consider $14.95 is cheap or reasonable?

That's all for now. Thank you.

Regards,
Andrew Chen

That’s cheap. 8GB of traffic alone can cost more then that.

I think if you provide lightning fast support and account setup then it doesn't really matter what you charge if it's reasonable.

I agree with Justin. With in reason, I'd pay more for super fast and accurate support!

Case in point: Some months ago I was having a problem getting into the email account on my site. So I sent an email to my host's tech support via my ISP mail account. I usually setup a nickname "support" that parses out to the tech support address of my host. On this ISP email account I had forgotten to so the message went to my ISP's tech support not my host. Well, I soon noticed the error and sent it to the proper address, they replied fast and all was made fine.

BUT, 3 days later I get an email from my ISP saying they don't have such as site (my site) hosted with them, and add "Why don't you look into moving your domain here? We have lots of great packages." I replied "I sent this message 3 DAYS AGO!!! And now you're getting back to me?! Why should I host with you?!?!" Never heard from them again. Thank goodness I didn't host with them from the start.

Heh, along same lines:

Sent an email requesting info to a host, who replied 14 days later with some excuse of a mail mix up. Yeah well, needless to say I had forgotten about it and the host should have just claimed they "never got it".