This is not to complain about the prices of hostonfly.net hosting, actually I find them very affordable. I just want to clarify their pricing scheme, because to "small website owners" (with sites getting little traffic) the offer as described on the hostonfly.net website looks cheaper than it actually is.

This is the offer, as seen on http://secure.hostonfly.net
Virtual Servers: Unlimited, Free
Free Bandwidth: 25 Mbytes
Extra Bandwidth: $0.60 - $1.95 per Gb

Q: As I understand all of the features listed on the left side are included into "Per Gbyte Price" and I will not pay any fixed amount monthly?
A: Yes, that's right! $0.60 - $1.95 per Gbyte!

Q: How often do you bill my account?
A: We bill your account daily and per MByte [...]
The "free bandwidth" is just one time, not daily or monthly, it's to let you try the service when signing up. Otherwise bandwidth cost depends on how much you use, for little use it's about 2$/Gig. and the average "small website owner" will understand that this is what he's going to be charged.

So, if his site uses 100 MB/month, he believes that the 2$ (=1 GB) are worth 10 months of hosting. WOW! That's cheap! We all know that most websites don't even use 100 MB, so they'll get even more hosting for the 2$...

Of course this isn't true, otherwise I wouldn't type this post ;) But where's the catch?

They say that they are billing daily and per MB.

What they don't say is, that they are rounding the exact amount to the next higher cent, so the minimum charge is 0.01$ / day, which is worth 5 MB.

The other thing they don't say is, that this billing isn't done for the aggregated daily data transfer of a user account, but for each virtual server individually (contraty to what one may understand from their answer to the second question in the quote above).

So if I have 5 sites, each using 1 MB / day, they together use 0.01$ worth of bandwidth (5 MB at a price of 2$/Gig), but I'll be billed 0.05$/day, 0.01$ for each server.

This all boils down to the fact that there is a minimum fee per virtual server of 0.30$/month or 3.65$/year.

Of course that's really low cost hosting, I haven't seen another host offering all the features of hostonfly.net for just 3.65$/year.

Really sad is, that Hostonfly is hiding even this little minimum fee, making visitors to their website believe that all they have to pay is bandwidth, which obviously is not true.

Just try out new version of our site.

Just try out new version of our site.

You might want to have someone proof read your site. There were tons of grammar errors and spelling errors. Just some advise.


It will be interesting to see if this model works. In my opinion, it is too damn confusing. People do not want to have to do mental gynmastics when they buy. But who knows??


Looks like you are using HSP Complete?

No, we are using our own software.

Originally posted by HostOnFly
Just try out new version of our site.

Hmm,... for the virtual hosting new is the "get a quote" calculator, right?

To me such a "price calculator" makes the whole thing look complicated. If I even need a calculator to figure out how much I have to pay, that's probably not what I want...

If this is your idea for how to clarify your pricing scheme, I'm sorry, it doesn't clarify anything. To clarify means to explain and not to provide a means for calculating what apparently shall not be explained.

I believe you'd get more clients if you'd officially charge a daily minimum fee of 0.01$ per virtual server. That's a price nobody can beat anyway, so you could present it like this:

- Virtual servers, just 0.01$/day!!!!!!
- With 5 MB of data transfer included!!!!!!
- and more data transfer available for 0.6$ - 2$ per Gigabyte!!!

Then you put a hotlink on the last of these three, which leads to the page with the pricing tables. On top of that "pricing" page you repeat that the minimum fee per virtual server is 0.01$/day, and you explain that if a site needs more than 5 MB/day, the user can buy additionnal chunks of 5MB at the same low price of 0.01$!!! Next you explain that this corresponds to a price of 2$/Gig., and that sites with high data transfer will get even lower prices for bandwidth. Followed by the tables with the prices...

Your overall site design isn't really perfect yet, it's not simple enough. Look at how sites of other big hosts are organized and don't try to invent something more "original". I mean the main sections of these hosting sites are pretty much "standard": Virtual hosting, Dedicated hosting, Support, etc..

The important thing is in my opinion to get the site more self-explanatory, more simple:

"Contact Us" could be a sub-element of "About HOF"
"Web board" could be an element of "Support"
"Try for free and buy" is no useful main category
"Control Pannel" shouldn't be part of the main "menu", it's just for members...
"Our Products"?? Isn't the main product the hosting?

Again, look at how other sites of big hosts are done. But don't simply copy them ;).

You seem to have good graphics and web development skills, but are all these HTML frames really useful?? The site doesn't work with Netscape,...

Ok, these are just a few thoughts,
Good luck
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