I started out 15 years ago as a graphic designer (yeaaaa! 2007 is my 15 year anniversary)... after opening my first printing/copy shop it was a natural progression to get into web design and then hosting...all my customers needed it, and I was simply referring them (and their money) to someone else. DUH!
When I started in the early 90s...hosting was very volatile..companies went
out of business frequently. I was charging my customers ANNUALLY...but when my provider went down (happened 3 times), I was stuck with new setup/transfer fees and still having to keep my customers happy (even though I couldn't get any more money from).
Finally! I found a reliable provider. I was paying them 10 per site...which later, due to volume went down to $5 per site.
I was charging my customers $10-$50 per month. I did this because it included an hour of updates to their site and whatever support they needed. (I still charge 30-100 for hosting to business customers)
Hosting was VERY expensive back then, and this was a great deal I was getting. The reason I got it so cheap was because of the strength of the US dollar (at the time).
My host was in Canada so to THEM I was paying $10-$20 per site (instead of $5-$10). Which was much more in line with the industry average.
But it did a wonderful thing for my business. Instead of the sale STOPPING at design...a ONE TIME sale, got me a customer and money for years.
This residual income grew and helped me to grow my business, and even survive the dot com bust (even though I was homeless twice from 1999-2001).
By the time this occured, my host and I had done business for several years, and was very helpful...I had several dedicated servers, and was able to work out a payment schedule.
So here is how you can turn your 35 cents into $10 or more:
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1) Add hosting to your services and host all your web customers if you haven't already
This will create a residual income for you and keep your cash flow positive and ever increasing over time
2) get RESELLER hosting.
Initially I paid for hosting one site at a time, as each customer came. This meant the more customers I got, the MORE it cost me for hosting.
Also it made it difficult for me to manage them with all the different logins etc
When I eventually got on RESELLER hosting all my domains were in one spot and the more customers I got, the LESS it cost me.
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I am now at the point where I have a bunch of servers and offer hosting to other designers etc.
So just as an example:
I sell a web designer 2gb of space on a CPanel/WHM/Fantastico Setup (unmetered bandwidth) with unlimited domains.
They pay $14.95/mo for it.
==>When they have 10 customers...they are paying only 1.49 per domain
==>when they have 20 custoemrs they are only paying 75 cents per domain
==>when they have 40 customers they are paying just about 35 cents per domain!
Yet they are charging no less than $10 per customer, per month in hosting.
That's a MINIMUM of $400 a month, from their cost o $14.95 per month!
YAH!
Think about it...MOST web hosting customers use less than 50MB of space...you can easily get 40 websites into 2GB of HDD space.
Plus there is no charge for any of the designer's PERSONAL or IN-HOUSE sites they may have or be developing.
RESELLER hosting can easiliy be transferred over to dedicated...WHEN you get big enough
MORAL: Don't leave money on the table...charge for hosting every month and buy RESELLER hosting
