When searching for a new host. I don't think that the price should be much of a determining factor. Of course you must buy within your means, but I honostly (being in the business) don't see how some of these companies sleep at night knowing that they are ripping people off with such high prices.
The cost of a server has gone down so much in recent years that one cannot convince me that paying these outragious prices is worth it.

What kind of prices are you talking about? Ripping people off would be not giving the customer what they paid for, not high prices.

Price also depends on your customers.

If you cater to people who need a LOT of help, then you should have greater prices, this is only fair, they're getting more, you should be getting more (you = a host)

If you provide average hosting service, I mean, good service, but not necessarily going to extraordinary means to provide support, then you ought to be providing services at the competitive rate.

If you're not providing support at all, I suppose you ought to be chargin a lot less than competitive rates.

Remember, the law of customers is, we'll be the most for the least.dv

Originally posted by TrafficMan
one cannot convince me that paying these outragious(sic) prices is worth it.

Hmm... what prices would they be. While I personally understand there is some pretty amazing pricing out there, you haven't let us in on what you seem offended about. I'm all for a good rant myself but some backing evidence would be nice :)

Greg Moore

Trafficman, since your ' In the Business ' let me tell you alittle story about having employers helping you run your business and keeping it profitable.

Each staff memeber needs to feed there wife/husband and kids and they demand anywhere between 18-25 dollars and hour, Running a webhosting company 'alone' is just crazy but that also depends on how much customers you have...

Yes Yes i know compared to staff * Customer amounts you will be making a good margin from your customers but at the end of the day you still have to pay your staff.

There is no point for a customer going please give me this i know how much you pay for it, because in reality Web Hosting is not about good servers and a fat pipe of bandwidth only, but also involves customer care, support, admins, taxs and on and on and on.

Host that charge more are experienced because they have made the mistake at the start by charging $3 for 100 megs and 10 gig bandwidth, Yes you over sell alittle and cover the servers costs and then??? How about money you must earn, money you have worked hard for! You work 8, 16, 20 hours a day for what? Dont host also deserve to make money?

if i was not in the industry and serious about my website being hosted on good servers i would rather pay the highest price rather that the lowest!

I know there are many customers out there looking for a good deal and fare enough it can be offered by many of us but at the end of the day how has that customer improved your company? Giving you more hours of support to do for what $3 dollars a month? 10cents a day?

Seriously i love helping customers and trying to offer them a excellent deal but like everything in life there are limits.

Just my 100 lines worth ehehe, Sorry about the typos etc but im very tired and i thought i needed this to be clear.

Kind regards :rolleyes:

Just my 100 lines worth ehehe, Sorry about the typos etc but im very tired and i thought i needed this to be clear. I only counted 30 lines (only 19 unwrapped)..so please feel free to expand another 70 after some rest :D

Just wanted to pat Choppy on the back and say Ditto.

Free bandwidth, free servers, free rent, free switches, free routers, free software, and free control panels still does not pay the human to put it all together, make it work, and then teach the user how to use it as well as being there to fix it when it breaks.

It would take 2,160 $5 per month accounts to pay a single $15/hour Tech to be there 24 hours a day 30 days a month. That's assuming EVERYTHING else was free! Ironically, with that many accounts we'll need more than one tech available to service them. To remain in business...even with EVERYTHING ELSE BEING FREE we have two choices... pay the tech less therefore lowering the quality of service and skill set or charge the clients more.

Luckily for the clients there are hosts that choose to lower their prices and there are hosts that choose to pay a fair wage to ensure the delivery of quality services.

With so many options for the end user to choose from it amazes me how many complaints we still see. If your goal is cheap... you have hundreds of hosts to choose from. If your goal is quality...you have hundreds of hosts to choose from. If your goal is cheap quality...you have hundreds of new hosts to choose from (just be prepared to move around as these are usually short term).

To be fair... us hosts are lucky there are so many clients out there to choose from as well ;)

Wow... in my weariness I've just discovered that I can't figure out what any of us are complaining about. Life is good :D

Originally posted by Deb
Free bandwidth, free servers, free rent, free switches, free routers, free software, and free control panels...

you forgot the free lunch. Oh wait... I remember someone telling me there 'ain't no such thing' :)

Greg Moore

Just wanted to pat Choppy on the back and say Ditto.


Here here....

Originally posted by Choppy
if i was not in the industry and serious about my website being hosted on good servers i would rather pay the highest price rather that the lowest!

I know there are many customers out there looking for a good deal and fare enough it can be offered by many of us but at the end of the day how has that customer improved your company? Giving you more hours of support to do for what $3 dollars a month? 10cents a day?

Seriously i love helping customers and trying to offer them a excellent deal but like everything in life there are limits.


Bravo... You just won my reseller account when my design company gets online...

Hello
Our signups drifted dwon to such a low level and we were losing so many customers to cheaper hosts that we had to lower our prices a bit.

Now we have mopre sign ups but the amazing thing is that the average sale value is the same as before.
People are just signing up for larger plans which they barely use.
Its very interesting consumer behaviour.

There comes a point where high prices can be "reassuringly expensive"
Some people like luxury products but nobody really needs them.

(don't tell my wife that or my Leica cameras will be heading for the second hand shop)

Gordon

$15 per hour is not much. Working 10 hour days, five days a week you would earn just under $40k per year. If you had three staffers, and 10 servers (ave. cost $199 per month- just a ballpark figure) then you would pay $120k in staff wages (don't forget benifits, insurances, etc. if you're a nice employer who can find a good insurance co.) THat would be just under $24k per year for servers. You'll also have building rent/lease/mortage, maintenance, equipment, utilities, etc. Eving considering such cost,s, you're going to pay roughtly 70-80% of your cost to employees (taxes neglegible).

So if what outrageous pricing is $10 per month for 100 MB disk and 3 GB transfer, you're outta your mind.

The cost of hosting is substantially more than $5/per account/per month (iven the account is one of those silly unlimited plans)

Please tell us ,what is outrageous,say for 100 MB disk, 6 GB bandwidth: $5/ mo, $10 $15 $20 $25 $30 .......

lowered prices twice this year to stay competitive, at the beginning of the year our cheapest plan was $9.95 a month it is now at $5.95 and to tell you the truth I am thinking about raising it again.
Sure I am getting more signups but I also find myself spending more time to earn less.

Sometimes I see these $2.00 a month host offering 10 Gigs or worse unlimited and I wonder how many people get suckered into that trap. How much money are these guys making? Some of them seem to be doing really good. But how do they sleep at night knowing they are not providing any real service to their customers?
I love it when I get emails like one I just received a half hour ago from a customer "Awesome. Once again I'm impressed with your service." and he pays $20.00 bucks a month for an account he could get for $9.00 somewhere else. Why? Because he knows he will continue to get the service that makes him say Awesome.

What is price? It is not calculated in space and bandwidth but in human terms and the people that stand behind that hosting company.

Everyday it seems as if I see someone coming on here asking for a reseller plan for as little money as they can get it for. I wonder are they really going to resell? If so why is price the #1 concern? When I was reselling I paid top $$ for my accounts because I wanted to make sure that my clients were happy, I am building a business not here to just make a fast buck. I also wonder how many poor customers get burned by the resellers only concerned with what the account cost not the service they will receive thus their clients receive.

As I said the other day sometimes I wonder what hosting is coming to.

OK off my soap box and back to work.


Monte

couldn't agree more :) My feeling are almost exactly the same as Monte. It's a pretty simple rule of thumb that people work better when they feel their time is worth something. I'd personally find it pretty hard to just the sort of support I do if I knew in the back of my head that they were only paying $2 a month. I know everyone should be treated equal, regardless of their expenditure, and we do treat everyone that way - but only because we've set our pricing to make sure we feel value for money as well.

We're dead smack in the middle of the market I feel, but there would be no way that we'd change our business plan to try to gain more signups by undercutting to the rate that some of these guys do. Of course our hardware and transfer is a little more pricy as well so that's always a consideration

Greg Moore

I had a prospective customer today enquiring about an account with appox. 75 MB disk space, approx. 1 GB/month bandwidth, approx. 10 e-mail/user accounts, own domain (he'd already purchased the domain, but it still costs me to host DNS), and a MySQL database. I told him this would cost about $27.47 per month depending on exactly how much disk space and bandwidth he was going to use, and how many e-mail/user accounts there were going to be. This would have worked out at about $327.57 per year, so he went off to someone else who had offered him about $200 for the same account. What else can I say?

This is the problem.

When I started hosting in 1999 I was reselling for below10host.com
When I got my own servers I kept to the same pricing right up until last week.
But prices in the market have fallen considerably.
It got to the stage we wer elosing more customers than we were gaining.
Out of interest I went back to below10host and their prices had come down since 1999.

I track where customers go to by looking at their DNS when they cancel.
Quite often its the $2 hosts but more often than not its hosts who are about 20 - 30% cheaper but offering more facilities for the money.

I also did a price survey which showed that our prices were amongst the highest of a randomly selected group of hosts.
In the UK the price difference was even greater with our UK prices being far higher (but our competitors were offering silly low bandwidth allocations with £20 per Gb overage)

We have only reduced price by about 10%
I also removed SQL server as standard on Windows 2000 and dropped the price of those plans.
At the same time I have increased reseller prices and changed the plan as there was no way we were going to compete with 2GB reseller plans at $25.

I also started offering our 10MB plan monthly (previously only annual) which gives us a low entry level price point.

All I can say is that by reducing prices we have stabilised the business and are making more money.
Its noticeable even in a few days how many more signups we are getting.

The average value of sales has not decreased but the number of sales is up.

Gordon

Originally posted by HostFox
I had a prospective customer today enquiring about an account with appox. 75 MB disk space, approx. 1 GB/month bandwidth, approx. 10 e-mail/user accounts, own domain (he'd already purchased the domain, but it still costs me to host DNS), and a MySQL database. I told him this would cost about $27.47 per month depending on exactly how much disk space and bandwidth he was going to use, and how many e-mail/user accounts there were going to be. This would have worked out at about $327.57 per year, so he went off to someone else who had offered him about $200 for the same account. What else can I say?

Wow, that's...kind of high though. Not even Verio is that expensive.

Just a question from someone not involved in the hosting business & completely clueless:

What *would* be a reasonable price for average support, 99% uptime, around 50-100 MB diskspace and ~ 3 Gigs of data transfer?

I'm not asking for offers, so please don't tell me to take it to the requests forum. I'll do so when the time comes for me to switch hosting companies.

I'm just wondering what sort of price range I should be looking at for features like that?

Obviously, I don't want to spend that much money, being the poor student that I am, but I don't want to go with a cheap company only to find that I got what I paid for, either.

Hi
I just looked at the spreadsheet I compiled when I did my survey.
The prices for a 100MB plan vary from $1.99 to $24.99

Not much help really.

Gordon

The prices for a 100MB plan vary from $1.99 to $24.99 $1.99? :eek:

Originally posted by Aralanthir
Just a question from someone not involved in the hosting business & completely clueless:

What *would* be a reasonable price for average support, 99% uptime, around 50-100 MB diskspace and ~ 3 Gigs of data transfer?

In my opinion, a reasonable price for that sort of package would be around $5 to $10 per month.

Hi,

If you take a look at our site 100 megs and 3.5gig bw is $9.50

How many host out there are selling the exact same thing for $2.50

Smart Customer that has been around would say excellent deal thank you very much then might even go post in our testimonials in our forum.

Less experienced customers would say no way hostONC*** has unlimited for etc etc.

i Do not try and convince them that there is no such thing as unlimited etc. We dont bother we wish them luck and if at any time they are not happy at there current host, to come back and we will take them in with open arms.

Thank you to other people that have added important expenses that i have missed.

HostFox charges what he sees fit, and if he is selling at that price good on him, he would have less customers but be making more profit anyway because of his prices... Please consider that he is also running windows box ( I think )

Our prices for the Australian market are going to go up soon, as one of the biggest web host down here charge $38 AUD approx $24 USD for 20 megs space and 500 megs transfer!

Yes its amazing how many customer we get from them but it is also amazing that the customers that i have spoken to on live chat have told me straight out " I dont trust you because your too cheap, Why do you charge $5.50 AUD when they charge $38 AUD" I try to explain that we dont have phone support and this cuts costs but they just stick to that one big host.

Ohh well... Am i getting closer to my 100 lines :)

Kind regards

I'm extremely concerned about this whole situation. I have been in the ISP / Hosting / Web design industry since 1996. And recently I have nottist that there are alot of new hosting company's offering hosting almost for free. This is a great problem since we the hosts that do charge an average moderate monthly fee are loosing alot of clients do to these 1.99 / month 1.00 / month etc..etc.... hosts. My main problem is the reputation that the hosting industry is getting because of these "cheap hosting company's" but as I always say to my clients that come back from bad hosting experiences "You get what you pay for"

Cheap host:

You get overcrowded servers
You get slow support
unknowledable support person
Bad uptime
The list goes on....


Moderate host:

You get a stable server that is not overcrowded
You get fast support (Since there is money to afford support)
Knowledable staff (Enough income to hire the right person)
great uptime
The list goes on....


I totally understand if you wish to gain some extra clients you break your prices for a limited time. But once you do this for ever then the quality of your support, business, uptime, servers start to degrade great.

and these are my only 2 pennies left

Hi
The $1.99 was at http://www.******.com/

We have lost a few customers to them.
We registered the domain name for them and were still listed as tech contacts.
We have been contacted by many of their customers trying to contact them when the servers went down.

I couldn't contact them so I deleted their whois info.
Its all I could do to stop it rubbing off on us.
(people thought we owned them!)
The guy gave bogus info when he registered the domain name I think.

Our costs have come down a bit in the past year but there is no way we will be going to the $5 per month for large plans.
Its nice to have small plans at $5 for people just starting out but thats only possible because they use little in the way of resources.

Gordon