Ask HN: How to charge hostgator hosting to a client?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5465212

by Vejita00 • 13 years ago

1 4 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hi all,

I have a question for you. I made a website for client and I'm hosting it on hostgator.I have account which costs me about 10$ a month. Now that I sold website to my client, how can I charge them that 10$ for hosting?I have my credit card number typed on hostgator.I can't tell them give your credit card so I can type it in my hostgator control panel and then hostgator will take 10$ from your credit card every month.

This is my first sale and I don't know how to solve this hosting question. Sorry for sounding like a newbie :)

tnorthcutt• 13 years ago

Why can't you add their credit card to the account? Can you also change the account details so that they own the account?

Barring that, simply charge them $10+n/month, where n represents the value they receive from you handling all aspects of their hosting account. You can charge their credit card on a recurring basis using e.g. Paypal, Stripe (best), another credit card gateway, or simply have them pay you up front for a year. A few hundred dollars as a lump sum is a trivial amount for a reasonable business to pay to have you manage all aspects of hosting their website for a year.

gee_totes• 13 years ago

Two answers:

a) you can tell them it will be $10 a month for hosting, and offer to set it up for them with their credit card, or the client can make their own hosting account and host it themselves.

b) You can chage up front for a year of hosting, then let them know you'll be contacting them in a year for another year of hosting.

I would suggest a) is the better one. I tried to do b), but then got lazy/too many clients/hosting costs were negligible anyway, and now a bunch of my clients just get free hosting.

johnfuller• 13 years ago

I wouldn't bother. Have them handle their own hosting. There are multiple possible traps with offering any sort of hosting services.

1. Look at the business model. Web hosting providers make a seriously small margin on their sales and their profits come from high volumes. It's difficult to add any value there.

2. You can't offer the support that the hosting company can offer. The hosting company may or may not have good support, but they can provide it 24 / 7. You have your own life and it's not worth having to respond to emergencies when you are normally unavailable. Sure, you may be able to charge for that time, but the host can probably offer that same support for no extra charge.

3. Problems with hosting can pop up at the worst times. Imagine that you have overbooked yourself, you have multiple deadlines that are just around the corner and then all of a sudden you have to deal with a hosting problem. It's bad that you have to take time away from urgent and probably better paying work to deal with that issue, but it's even worse to have to do a mental switch away from one project, deal with the hosting issue and then have to do another mental switch to get back into the project you were distracted from.

4. You could be a world class developer but a hosting issue can reflect negatively on you from the perspective of the client. A bad hosting issue can sour the overall experience that the client has with your services. Again, it's just not worth it.

5. Many developers don't have the expertise to deal with hosting issues, which means you will probably provide a worse service than the hosting company can provide.

6. Hosting is a commitment that you may not want to make. If you decide to get out of client work, then you will have to deal with migrating your clients into different hosting situations. I have seen this turn out bad for the client.

As the application developer, offer to setup the application on their hosting and offer some sort of maintenance plan for the application, not the hosting. Set the expectation for the client that the hosting provider should be the point of contact for hosting issues and that maintenance issues with the application may have a 24 - 48 hour turn-around (or whatever you feel comfortable with.) Don't even recommend a provider, or if you do, then compile a short list of good providers and have the client make the decision on which one to choose.

Vejita00• 13 years ago

Thanks for answers guys. She just called me to tell me she don't want to type card numbers on internet (afraid :) ), so she will just give me money on hand.

Ask HN: How to charge hostgator hosting to a client?

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