Web Hosting Talk : Advertising Forums : Community Reviews : Other Reviews : Automatic plan generator, price feedback

[blackworm]

I'm wondering if I can get some feedback about the automatic custom plan generator I created.

Can you try it out and create a few packages and let me know your opinions on the pricing.

It's located at

http://www.nexusdns1.com/calculator.php

Thanks

[Joseph_M]

Those sort of prices would be good for local businesses, but not general internet competition. Charging monthly ($0.05) for subdomains??? Why? I'd understand a setup fee for additional subdomains, but not a monthly charge.

[blackworm]

It's aimed at customization, many sites don't use sub-domains but their still charged for them (To a degree).

It's mostly aimed at you get what you pay for, it should allow people to make custom plans that are relatively of competitive.

I'm just finished tweaking it actually (The link above isn't where the actual plan generator is located), these are a couple packages it created.

50 Meg Space
1 Gig bandwidth
1 FTP Account
2 SQL Databases
2 E-Mail Accounts
2 Sub-Domains
$1.64/month

And on the larger end
400 Meg Space
8 Gig Bandwidth
3 FTP Accounts
5 SQL Databases
5 E-Mail Accounts
5 Sub-Domains
$9.95/month

Granted their more expensive then a lot of the bargain basement hosts, but it's not outrageous either.

Anyways, thanks for taking the time to reply, I appreciate it.

[brendandonhu]

I don't see any point in an automatic plan generator because every host is different. Some hosts are run by 12 year olds in their basements and they can charge $0.12/month because they don't need profit. Then again, its usually with a reseller of a reseller of a reseller who provides no support and has bad uptime. Then, you have the hosting company with sales reps, support reps, a person or two in billing, 24/7 support, 99.9% uptime, a toll free phone number, and an offsite helpdesk for when the server goes down. An automatic plan gen gives the same prices for both of these companies. Besides, everyones business plan is different and they have different pricing structures.

[silock]

Going by 1's is pointless and makes the forms HUGE. Go by 100 MB's for the diskpace and bandwidth.

[brendandonhu]

Also if you buy less space it generally costs more per meg than buying a lot of space.

[blackworm]

This is intended to as a marketing strategy because I know when I first started web designing back in the day I would spend days on-line looking for a host with a package that suited my needs. I think it's also nice to be able to make your own packages.

I've adjusted the values and things like databases, ftp accounts and E-mail accounts are a measly $0.02 a month, so there is no real set-up fee, and a very low monthly fee.

Space and bandwidth are a fixed rate; space is $0.009/meg and bandwidth is $0.0009/meg. I know it looks incredibly cheap (Marketing strat again) but when you make a plan it turns out to be fairly competitive, more then 13 year old basement host granted, but I also want to leave myself room to expand in the near future.

I've also changed the selections list for all the features so it loads faster.

You can check it out in my sig.

Thanks for the feedback.