Has anyone thought of/used this pricing plan yet?

Let's say you start out with a base hosting plan of "essentials", such as a small amount of webspace(50 megs or so), some email addresses, tech support, x amount of bandwith, backups. Costs x dollars a month. Then, say, each extra 50 megs of space costs x dollars extra monthly(a dollar or something), MySQL costs x dollars extra monthly(three dollars maybe), a cgi-bin an extra 50 cents or so monthly, etc etc. You could include almost everything in this graduated pricing scale.

Would this be economical? I'm not a webhost, and I don't know specifics for it. But a system like this would sure be ideal for most customers, I would think(as long as you have a wide range of customers...if you had just a bunch of people making personal websites you'd put all the other features on the server for nothing and waste money).

I've seen several hosts doing this lately but no names come to mind right now. Anyway, when I played around with their configurators it seemed the prices were always a lot higher than similar packages with other hosts.

jericho

Check out this thread:

http://WebHostingTalk.com/showthread.php?threadid=11579

It discusses a similar idea.

crazy host guy does that don't they?

Yeah, that's sort of what I was thinking of, but I came up with the idea when I was looking at webhosting plans and saying "I want PHP and MySQL, but I don't care about Frontpage or a cgi-bin!".

Originally posted by KoRnholio
I was looking at webhosting plans and saying "I want PHP and MySQL, but I don't care about Frontpage or a cgi-bin!".

This will not work very good simply because there are features which cost a host nothing (cgi-bin or frontpage support) and there are features which cost $ (disk space, bandwidth).
If a host doesn't offer a cgi-bin on his low-cost plans he does this for political reasons and to "force" you to use higher plans.