Hi everyone,
I run vhost, a web hosting company that is listed here on Drupal in the services page.
I'm considering offering a special deal on webhosting which will be lifetime hosting for a one-off fixed fee. I would like to hear different people's opinions as to whether or not this is something that would generally be attractive.
The main questions I have to ask are:
1) Would you be interested in a hosting plan of this type?
2) What would you consider to be a good price for such a plan? (Prices in dollars or GBP, please!)
The hosting would still include all the services that we currently provide, e.g., pre-installation of Drupal 4.6.x or 4.7, unlimited web space, unlimited email accounts, unlimited/unmetered data transfer, etc.
I look forward to your comments and answers. Thanks for your help.
Regards
Patrick
Comments
It sounds remarkably
It sounds remarkably attractive.
It's something I would definitely look into if it was in Australia, although if the deal is good enough and didn't cost my firstborn I'm fairly open minded with going elsewhere.
And uhh yeh I wouldn't have a clue what to price it at. I'd like it for $10 (the running joke of I want to download the entire internet in under a minute for $10) but probably closer to $1k might be more what you'd be looking at for lifetime. Or maybe that might be too cheap too unless you had a lot of people picking up on it? I have no idea how much these things cost to maintain :|
But yes, definitely interested, specially when I get this homeschooling website off the ground. Whenever that may be.
works at bekandloz | plays at technonaturalist
I dunno
I get kind of wary when someone uses the word unlimited.
"Lifetime" really just means
"Lifetime" really just means for as long as you stay in business. For that to be meaningful, you either have to have a reputation going back years, or be publicly traded, or otherwise have something to give customers confidence that you'll be around for a long time. Another way to look at it is that if you're charging N times the going rate for a year, then you need to be around for N years.
Do you have the resources to back it? What happens if, for example, your own connectivity rates start skyrocketing? Or if you're outsourcing your data center, what happens if they fold? If you're a tiny company, how many management level employees can you lose at once without threatening the company's survival?
Gary Feldman
Gary, Yeah - these are the
Gary,
Yeah - these are the concerns I have - not that I might fold, but that the offer may be difficult to get across precisely because people will ask the same questions you've asked.
To put you (and everyone else) in the picture, all my servers are hosted through Pipex (who are Pipex?) who are the UK's largest web hosting company with a tier 1 network and state-of-the-art data centres. I can confidently say that Pipex won't be going bust. But then, wouldn't I have said that about Worldcom?
Who am I? I'm a web designer / developer primarily, but also running a small handful of businesses over here in the UK. One of those businesses is vhost.org.uk which is the company I use to provide web hosting.
I own the servers that I host on outright and usually co-locate. This enables me to customise the services and flavors that I offer on those servers to suit my purposes. Hence, at the moment, I've got vhost focused on providing Drupal-friendly hosting - cos I love Drupal - but I would like to expand this to provide oscommerce-friendly hosting, Joomla-friendly hosting, Plone-hosting and so on.
Why am I thinking of making this offer? Because I can, really. Most of the cost involved in providing hosting as, effectively, a one-man band is in the administration in managing, collecting and processing monthly and even annual payments. PayPal or WorldPay eat up a percentage of my profits each time I receive a payment and, whenever I don't receive a payment that I should, it takes my time to chase it, wait, chase it, wait and then (sometimes) have to go on to the server and remove the files and down the domain and take off the site.
So, I got to thinking - and the internal dialogue went something like this:
"if I can collect 5 years hosting payments up front, now wouldn't that be great? It would save me a fortune in time and money!"
"Yeah, but who's going to pay for 5 years hosting up front? I know I wouldn't!"
"Well, what if it wasn't for 5 years, what if it was for life?"
"OK, if the payment was right, so that balanced out against the cost of administering and processing monthly payments for a certain number of years, then that could work"
And the rest is history (well, as old as this forum post, anyway).
But, as you say, "lifetime is really for as long as I stay in business". I could offer an Alex Tew-style guarantee, I suppose - something like "the server will be paid for and supported and maintained and kept online for at least X years (starting from the day it launched), but possibly even longer (at least that's the aim)"
But would that work? Would that put people's minds at rest? And if not, then what would?
As before, ideas and opinions are welcomed
Regards
Patrick Nelson
www.vcommunity.org.uk
It sounds like you've got a
It sounds like you've got a good handle on the issues. I wouldn't let my critique stop you - I tend to be a fairly careful consumer, but there are plenty of people out there who don't think beyond the cost comparison.
I understand how the billing is a cost, but can you really provide that much support? Or do you find that your customers almost never need support? I might expect that to be the largest cost problem, because while the technology costs keep going down, people costs generally go up. And if you're doing all the support yourself, there will be a limit to how many accounts you can handle.
Gary Feldman
Gary, Thanks for the reply -
Gary,
Thanks for the reply - I think you're absolutely right - the support costs (and the administrative costs) are the most expensive elements - traditionally.
But that's why I've focused the vhost.org.uk hosting around Drupal and gain most of my business from the community here on Drupal. I do provide a level of support but, because I've optimised the server to work primarily for running Drupal and because I offer a pre-installation service for Drupal, most of the initial support issues are taken care of. Out of those that remain, it seems that most people come back here to the Drupal community to seek answers to those because they are mainly 'post-installation' issues.
If anything ever crops up server-side, it is usually because of some change or development within Drupal itself and that I can take care of virtually straight-away and it is usually a one-off issue inasmuch as I solve it for one hosting client, I solve it for all.
Focusing on providing hosting that is centred around a strong product like Drupal has proved to be really successful primarily because of the strong community here - IMO. If I do get this particular offer going, my plan is to donate some of the money that comes in to the Drupal project.
Regards
Patrick Nelson
www.vcommunity.org.uk