Ask HN: Do you charge your webdesign clients for ongoing hosting and support?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14880686

by cronjobma • 9 years ago

70 47 9 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Is it a good retainer model? How much are you making from it? Does it require a lot of ongoing work?

CrystalLangUser• 9 years ago

Yes. It would be unmanageable otherwise with multiple clients.

Why would I give up my time + work for free?

Hosting is an easy up sell because it becomes one less thing a client would have to worry about.

jakobbuis• 9 years ago

Yes. Definitively yes. If you're a typical web developer or agency, you're going to have a lot of one-off engagements, project and campaign websites. Those cost money to support, and your customer should supply that money. We never host without both a modest hosting fee, and a SLA for fixes, updates and perfective maintenance.

slice_of_life4• 9 years ago

SLA for fixes

Very curious how you price this...per fix or standard monthly fee? If it's a fee, how do you deal with absurd feature requests whose development costs far outstrip what you've quoted?

cubano• 9 years ago

If it's a fee, how do you deal with absurd feature requests whose development costs far outstrip what you've quoted?

You make it painfully clear in the original contract that all changes and features requests require additional cost quotes.

fyrstenberg• 9 years ago

Absolutely. Most clients (in my experience anyways) is actually happy that you can provide hosting so they don't have to spend time in an area they're usually unfamiliar with.

lexx• 9 years ago

We just charge hosting and a small support fee for the small sites. For startups or companies with bigger needs, we have tailor made contracts.

Imho, support has to be a significant part of a company's or freelancer's income. Otherwise, you have to constantly create new websites to avoid bankruptcy :P

mgkimsal• 9 years ago

I'm generally surprised when people don't. The few people I know who don't justify it with "I don't want to have to deal with all that support" (can't quite figure out what "all that support" covers).

"When people have an issue, who do they call?" "Me" "So... they're already calling you. Why not have some $ for that to cover it". "I just tell them to call the hosting company".

It baffles me how those folks stay in business.

I do think in some cases, it's the email support they don't want to deal with, not so much 'hosting'. A couple of folks I know just send everyone to fastmail or google for mail hosting (not something I recommend, but they again claim they don't want the 'headache').

Clubber• 9 years ago

Absolutely. As a general rule, never work for free, period. Not only will you not get income, but your business clients won't respect you or your product.

I mean it's ok to include a week or two to fix bugs that you might have missed, but be up front about that window and make sure that you differentiate bugs with features. Clients might blur that line.

qrbLPHiKpiux• 9 years ago

I see both sides of it. The end consumer is getting nickel-and-dimed from "support" from every angle anymore. You need to put "value" into support and make them feel, as they should, getting their money's worth out of it.

bryanrasmussen• 9 years ago

Even if they don't want to deal with the headache they can probably hire someone to handle it for less than they money they would take in for most 'support'. I mean most support issues are going to be small, anything big or difficult can then be a new piece of business.

on edit: if handled right it's almost like found money.

Daviey• 9 years ago

When i dabbled in this area, most of the lower end work was surprised there was an ongoing need for hosting. Either directly or their own provider... They thought that once it was bought, it just 'ran' on the internet.

gt22• 9 years ago

To this I say educate them.

Cozumel• 9 years ago

The danger with that is you educate yourself out of a job.

nfriedly3• 9 years ago

Yes, I charge for hosting and support, especially for smaller clients who don't want to know or care about hosting. It means I can do quick fixes and answer questions without either if us having to worry about billing.

I don't make a lot from it, but enough to be worth the trouble. For example, there's a couple of local businesses that I set up single-page sites on github pages. They pay me $25/month, mostly to answer their questions. (Most recent question: "How do I embed a YouTube video into a PowerPoint?")

A lot of my larger clients use AWS or similar and pay their own hosting bills. Support is more if a mixed bag there, but I do try to get a support contract set up.

heythere124• 9 years ago

What would you do with smaller businesses when you decide to quit/retire and they need to take control of their own websites?

nfriedly3• 9 years ago

I'd help them find someone else to transfer responsibility to.

bdcravens3• 9 years ago

What's your hourly rate? $25/month doesn't give you much room for it to be profitable.

nfriedly3• 9 years ago

Well, yea, I charge $165/hr for random folks on the internet, but for locals I charge more like $60/hr. 20-30 mins/month tweaking or answering questions is a fairly realistic average for the local single-page sites.

I look at the local sites as a bit of local pride/civic duty - if I didn't do it then they'd either have crappier, more expensive sites or else no websites at all.

(I also have a full-time salaried position now that effectively pays about $60/hr. So I don't really have to worry about income at this point.)

My town is only about 2000 people, and most of them dont need a website. I figure I'd be getting the same questions either way, so I might as well get paid a bit ;)

hengheng• 9 years ago

Have someone guard the WordPress instance and run security patches on it is certainly worth money. Nobody wants to keep tabs on that.

jwdunne2• 9 years ago

We use it to subsidise our hosting fees and time to keep things up to date. It's often more convenient to control the website when doing online marketing work.

Changes may be a flat monthly fee, free as part of a larger retainer (if simple) or ad-hoc pay as you go based on amount of work.

It's not a lot and doesn't form a big part of the business but helps provide an all-in-one solution for clients who typically have no idea where to go next.

One thing we are winding down and I urge you to avoid is email support. It's simple to set up but you can quickly get overwhelmed by the amount of support involved. Email is often a fundamental to business, depending on industry, and it should be treated as such. We suggest clients use Gsuite. This leads to my final point.

You are not a hosting company, unless you pivot that way. You are not an email provider. You are a web design business and you should not let hosting overwhelm the core of what you do. Be ready to cut it off if it distracts too much from your core.

CharlesW• 9 years ago

You are a web design business…

Another way to look at this is that you're not a web design business (your perspective), you're a "solve my online problem" business (customer perspective). Yes, you're designing a web site, but in the service of increasing sales, improving discoverability for their potential customers, etc.

It seems like you intuitively know this, in which case the "extras" are potentially a distraction, but also an opportunity to bundle services into an ongoing "subscription".

jwdunne2• 9 years ago

Yes. The thing with hosting and email is that it adds overhead in an area that may not be a core competence.

You could spend a few hours fixing someone's email because they decided to bulk mail using your servers. That or they get hit by malware that does the same.

Those few hours would be better spent building websites.

It's a good complementary service but my warning was about drawing the line when it starts to encroach on what you do best. We have learned this the hard way.

point78• 9 years ago

For those that do, where are you hosting the site? Are you using a reseller package or just put the url onto whatever host you're using now?

slice_of_life4• 9 years ago

I had been doing the hosting with 3rd party providers but I realised that I could actually do it better myself if I built a multi tenant platform. For the support, I was doing a lot of the support anyway so I realised I might as well do it in my own platform.

For these reasons, I've deployed my app on a Vultr server, have a couple of clients on it for my beta and so far so good.

I'm still working on the billing system for my clients so that when they renew their hosting the next time round it will be on my platform.

A couple of things I didn't want to touch include domain selling and email hosting. My platform has turn key ecommerce tools that are good enough for customers to want to pay for. Domains are still done by a 3rd party (but they're mostly cheap) and as for email, I would rather provide integration with Zoho or google apps. I don't like the headache of email deliverability; it's not worth the effort at this stage in my startup - heck, even Shopify don't touch it.

Once I'm done with billing, my next big problem to solve is logistics. I need to find a way to help my merchants ship to their customers easily as it is still a very big problem for them. It will mean partnering with a myriad of logistics providers and creating an ecosystem for just this.

slice_of_life4• 9 years ago

Don't get why the downvotes. Still gonna kick ass.

mdekkers3• 9 years ago

Yes, and i'm not cheap. I have 2 HA clusters with 2 different providers, with sync and failover between the 2 sites. I also have DO as an emergency fallback / overflow. I manage and maintain everything for our clients. My cost is about $500 per month for 6 machines in total, 16CPU/64GB RAM/25TB SDD per machine.

My minimum monthly charge for hosting a site is $150 for a simple site, $300 for something more complex, and most of my clients are at $500. This includes 1/2/3 hours support/site changes respectively, and dealing with security, patching, speed, uptime etc.

If you can build something like above and keep it running, it is a nice money-maker.

spacetexas• 9 years ago

What kind of websites are they?

slice_of_life4• 9 years ago

Feels like a question I should have asked as well. $150 p/m per site seems exorbitant.

mdekkers3• 9 years ago

Mostly Drupal, some WP, some other custom stuff

jolmg2• 9 years ago

Why was this downvoted?

chrishn• 9 years ago

Interested, how do you come to these prices?

JoshMnem3• 9 years ago

I think that it's good to be on retainer, but I didn't find that providing hosting was worth the effort. A few hundred dollars here and there was not enough. If clients needed technical assistance, then they could pay a retainer or an hourly rate.

Example scenario to consider: if you're providing hosting, and the site gets hacked, and you're the webmaster, you have to clean it up without pay. If you manage a lot of sites, and they all get hacked because you put them on one server, then you get to clean up a lot of sites without pay. It's better to get paid hourly for those kinds of things.

ncouture• 9 years ago

What you say is true; I learned, and am still reminded of it, the hard way from time to time.

But it's nothing more than a problem waiting to be solved.

In my case I'm solving this problem by using static sites and managed web hosting.

Put simplicity where simplicity is due and segregate the more complex requirements. Static sites are going a very long way now, and a lot can be done with JavaScript on the client-side with modern browsers.

In many cases no back-end services are needed, but when they are, it can make a lot of sense to segregate them in a way they can power multiple sites with the same functionality requirements.

It's really up to the needs you have but in the end I feel it can really be worth it.

Heck, latest web standards let us componentize elements, we might all be better off with a global database that contains all of them in JSON or YAML format which we can load/dump from and that contains some kind of ACL (ala Firebase can do that).

Have a good day.

JoshMnem3• 9 years ago

Static sites are different. That sounds like a much better model for hosting. It doesn't matter if the servers get destroyed if there is little to clean up.

jolmg2• 9 years ago

Well, it wouldn't be without pay as you'd be paid for the hosting. If they all get hacked, that'd be on you for not taking preventive measures for it, right? The positive point is that it's easier to avoid being hacked than it is to fix it after the fact. Hosting it would be a passive income, which should typically be preferred, isn't it?

JoshMnem3• 9 years ago

It's impossible to entirely prevent hacking. I'm sure that there are people who have worked out a good hosting model, but I did not find it to be worth the time.

SomeStupidPoint• 9 years ago

I only ever delivered static pages, so my solution was to throw it on S3 and charge them 1.5x whatever the Amazon bill was. (Slightly fancier formula; that's the basic idea.)

(Okay, I actually usually went CloudFlare -> S3, because it wasn't much more set-up, but really drops the bills on static content delivery with a lot of caching.)

Automatic security by experts, minimal configuration on my part, and easy to hand-off when clients wanted someone else to take over. (Also, since it was in an AWS account I controlled, it meant I retained control of the website until they paid me -- never came up, but it never hurts to have leverage.)

I never made much off of it, but it wasn't a negative on my cashflow and kept a lot of clients in contact with me -- "Well, we wanted this new page and since you're the one running our website, let's just use you!"

ddingus• 9 years ago

Yes, I have. Not currently doing this work.

As a client, I won't actually do business with anyone who doesn't understand the need to fund those activities.

They will get swamped and fail, or the work will degrade and potentially fail as almost nothing works in a vacuum.

At a minimum, funding staying current, dealing with changes, dependent system changes, and the communication needed to make it all work will generally exceed the margins made on new projects.

If the goal is to make money and keep some of it, a retainer, or maintenance plan is needed.

Or, the expectation of paying time and materials on all post project work needs to be there, and it needs to be lean, no hassle.

My current arrangement is like this. Not quite enough to warrant a retainer, but enough that it needs to be paid for, unless I want my partner to starve or be unavailable to me when I need them.

Bundling hosting into this is a no brainer. They know that host well, you can always move, and it's efficient.

juddlyon• 9 years ago

You can purchase a managed VPS that runs cPanel and run dozens of marketing sites on it. My server cost $120ish and I collected $300ish - it was an extra $2500 a year in my pocket. I rarely had issues, and if I did, I contacted support to assist me.

However, I started another business and no longer wanted to be in the web hosting game. Migrating clients to new hosting was a nightmare and it ate into my profits. It's very hard to charge for a migration when you initiate it. Getting them to sign up for new hosting, handling DNS switchovers, etc.

YMMV. Another option is become an affiliate of a couple of your favorite providers. Learn their set up really well and refer businesses to them.

As for ongoing maintenance (security updates, content tweaks, form testing), HELL YES. Small recurring contracts are awesome. They make for better websites since they're being tended to, and it's a nice little stream for you once you have several of them going.

halfeatenpie• 9 years ago

A fairly sizable percentage of our product line is web hosting. Of course to note we started out as a hosting company and people focused on infrastructure.

I'd say hosting is a good way to retain clients and to continue to work with them. It's great for clients as well since we do host their website and if problems happen then we can help them fix it. The hosting fees are actually packaged "for free" to our maintenance fees which includes very small changes (text changes and minor updating). Major changes would be considered a new project.

Regarding time investment, our maintenance is almost none as most of our infrastructure code has been developed and put on autopilot including monitoring. There are minor blips we do have to worry about and handle, but overall everything works. We also have a person on-premise (inside the datacenter) who helps us with quick turnaround to hardware or physical problems.

Biggest time investment is working with the client directly on their projects.

ephimetheus• 9 years ago

I was thinking about doing that multiple times, but I always figured I didn't want to be liable if anything goes wrong with their stuff. Especially business e-mail is an area I would avoid at all cost, you don't want to be involved when the suits can't write e-mails anymore. All support I provided was billed hourly, and that was lucrative enough for me.

rograndom• 9 years ago

Yes.

I was part of a larger marketing / design agency where they charged standard vendor markup (15%) on hosting (which was a reseller account with cpanel), which was cheap for the clients but did not cover the costs of passing along support requests to the actual hosting company.

That agency went out of business 5 years ago and I absorbed the hosting business. All of the sites are WordPress and I had built an optimized stack along with automation for backups, updates, security scans, etc. For the changeover I set 3 levels of hosting power and rolled in the automated maintenance, domain name renewal and storage of backups. Email and SSL are add-ons provided by 3rd parties and marked up at least 100%.

Prices are $50, $150 and $500/mo.

The stack has changed over the years from a shared VPS to individual VPSs to docker containers. Everything is behind a load balancer / caching proxy so changing out the platform as needed was/is pretty painless when we find new ways of doing things.

All clients were required to enter into a new contract with monthly recurring CC billing or they were provided with their files and thank you for your past business letter. Every new site proposal includes the first year of hosting and maintenance, and is a hard requirement. I won't support a site that's on some $5/mo hosting plan running PHP 5.3 or who knows what. I can tell horror stories for hours, which just reminds me how much I don't want to live through them again.

We lost 1/3 of the customers, but I think we only needed 3 clients to equal the revenue of the previous system. For example, there's one client that we're charging $650/mo (with emails and multiple SSL domains) that was NEVER charged for hosting by the previous company. I was sure they were going to bail, but their support load previously was so large that we needed SOMETHING to justify keeping them on. Amazingly now that they know that when they break things there is an actual cost to picking up the phone to call us. They do have X hours per month of "free" support but then they have to start paying $100/hr. The new stack almost guarantees that breaks don't occur from our end and if we do, it's 30 seconds to flip over to a previous backup.

We've also gotten a few redesign jobs simply because they see our name on their credit card statements every month. I've personally never worked with these clients during the time of the previous company, but they came along way back when and would've gone with someone else if we weren't already in a relationship, no matter how loose.

Ask HN: Do you charge your webdesign clients for ongoing hosting and support?

Related Stories