Maybe this has been discussed before, but I figured i'd ask...

Just how low do you go on pricing?

I'm talking about yearly or monthly fees because for some accounts it's just not worth charging monthly.

Anyone go under $1.50 a month? No I don't want hosting, just looking at what the price margins are for people...

Someone will. Someone ALWAYS will :cartman:

Personally I don't even want to leave my bed for $ 1.50. You'll need 100 customers to make $ 150.- a month and that just about covers your server costs if you have a RS server.

It does not cover the hours you have to spend supporting the 100 customers and trying to get the server running the 99.9% that is usually advertised.

If you want to work for free try some volunteer work at the homeless shelter or your local hospital :D

I've seen prices as low as $ 0.99 / month though. ....well, whatever makes them happy.

If you are going to get into hosting I suggest not looking to be the lowest priced guy as you will always loose and there will always be someone who will go lower.. I personally would rather have 10 good customers that pay 10.00 a month than 50 customers that pay 2.00 a month.. I have also found <no flames please> but the el' cheapos that want the world for .99 a month seem to have 500% more support issues/requests than other users.. Could just be our experience but this is what I have found so far during my hosting venture..

We dont do less than $5 a month. By limiting ourselves like this we can take the time to provide the support required for each customer.

Is it realyl worth giving a years worth of support time to a customer paying $10 a year ? if course its not! :)

I don't think anyone that sells for $1.50 will be in business for long. With that, they wouldn't be able to support the sites that already on the servers, it would be pretty "tapped".

it looks like the bottom of the barrell is rising, there appear to be much less $0.99 hosting plans than there were even a couple of months ago. I too believe that they will attract too many "difficult cliens"

Originally posted by UH-Matt
We dont do less than $5 a month. By limiting ourselves like this we can take the time to provide the support required for each customer.

Is it realyl worth giving a years worth of support time to a customer paying $10 a year ? if course its not! :)
We don't go less than $25/mth and it's a sweet feeling indeed!! :D:agree:

$7.95 has always been the lowest. Over the years the feature list has been improved a bit on it, but the price always stayed where it is. After merchant fees, support costs etc, it's never going to make us rich :)

Oddly enough it's nowhere near the most popular plan so rest assured there's plenty of customers out there that aren't looking at 'everything for nothing'

I think the moment you begin looking at the low end of the market you're on a slippery downard hill that might prove hard to recover from.

If you price high, you can always go down later. Your customers will love you for it.

If you start low and need to price higher later you're probably not going to make many friends.

Greg Moore

Anyone go under $1.50 a month? There's always some, but only for a moment. Then, they are no more. And another one comes out. And the cricle goes round and round like energizer :)

Some can go under $1.50 according to the offering though, like 1MB space or small bandwidth (that make sense for $1.50) and survive, but just like what has been mentioned, it will be hard-pressed on support.

I just came accross a site where they are offering hosting for $ 1.99 per YEAR.

Beat THAT! :D

people will try to go lower and lower, but the bottom line is, if you want to last in this business, then you can only go so low. After a certain point, your losing money and you can't maintain a business if your losing money. As for what that point is, its different for everyone, i'd say not to go lower than 5 dollars a month as a pretty good guess; but like i said, its different for everyone.

i want to see the people that charge $1.99/year restart apache with what, several thousand vhosts to make the server pay for itself.

Hosting for $ 1.99 per YEAR. I wish them a lot of luck! :)

Originally posted by rusko
i want to see the people that charge $1.99/year restart apache with what, several thousand vhosts to make the server pay for itself.
hehe. :laugh:

You'd only need about 5000 accounts on that server @ $1.99/yr to make the business model work....:D

I find the cheaper the plans are the more support you need to provide. The ones who pay more... I hardly hear a word from them.

I think that anybody who charges very low is doing this more as a hobby in their spare time, where as those hosts that have higher charges do a better job and are there for their customers and will be there in years to come.

Well said stormhosts, totally agree with you there!