as some of you know I am starting a web hosting business I have been talking to some people who I know want to get a website up (people I talk to almost daily or when I get a hair cut and so on)

I was telling some of them my prices and they where like "Why are you charging so little?" "What is the catch" and so on. I thought my prices where high enough for the local area but I guess not....

:confused:

Prices here in no way really represent the entire webhosting market.

Ditto what daveman said. The question is, why are you charging so little? You price not only for your business to succeed, but also for what you can compete with in your market.

If you undercut yourself enough, people don't think they're getting a quality product. However, if you do charge higher, you have to make sure you actually *are* delivering a higher quality product and service.

7.95 for 100 mb disk space, 2000 mb bandwidth isnt high enough?

That's actually pretty low...

Originally posted by Torith
7.95 for 100 mb disk space, 2000 mb bandwidth isnt high enough?

on the lower side - but not the lowest on wht by far.

tons of hosts on here giving more for less (or so it would seem)

Originally posted by Torith
7.95 for 100 mb disk space, 2000 mb bandwidth isnt high enough?

Sounds reasonable to me, however I personally wouldn't do a hosting plan below $10 no matter what the disk space and transfer.

Local markets can easily get $25 and up for that though depending on where you are. How big is the town where you offer services and how close is it to a metro area?

I'm sorta in the same position, but i'm finding it helpful to ask people what prices they would expect to pay for hosting, and then evaluate what I need to charge. Most people don't really know market value, but they know what seems too high, or too low. Its a good place to start.

If I were going after local customers I'd quadruple my prices and give a disclaimer "or we will match any other web hosting price you've gotten locally".

you can fix up the pricing based your market area. I suggest intially concentrate more on your local market. Streamline your company financial flow. then get in to other market segments, with a compettive pricing.

I know a company which charged for a domain and 10meg space (for the year) in excess of $100. It all depends on what you want. Higher prices and maybe more trust. Or lower prices

The logic of charging more if your market can bare it is that:

if you can charge clients $19.95 for hosting then let's say you get 10 sign up a month. That means that you have made $199.50 and have only 10 clients to support. Let's extrapolate w/o any plans for growth and you have 120 clients by the end of the year.

if you charge clients $9.95 for hosting a month and get 20 sign up a month. That means you made $199.00 and now have twice the amount of people to support. Again extrapolating you would have 240 clients.

As you can see that charging less may get you more clients but then you have more work too. Somone might comment why do we not follow this same practice...my answer is that our local market is a dog's breakfeast and were working on acquiring more local accounts to grow the business.

Greetings:

While it didn't happen to us in Web hosting, back when we did custom application development, we were basically laughed at for charging $100 per hour (October 1998) when the "real" competition was charging closer to $200 per hour.

As it directly relates to hosting, be very careful of pricing based on WHT standards; the overwhelming majority of WHT pricing is extremely low.

I would recommend surveying your local market to see what others are charging for what values; you may be surprised.

I know in our county, shared Web hosting runs $50 to $100 per month or more.

Thank you.

The price doesnt matter some times. That wich matter is to wich type of people you try to sell. If you try to sell to a small bay propably will tell to all that has a new web site .if you try to ell to a busnesman.. will just say ok and dont take from you because is cheap :)