
Ask HN: Do you charge your webdesign clients for ongoing hosting and support? - cronjobma
Is it a good retainer model? How much are you making from it? Does it require a lot of ongoing work?
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slice_of_life
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_life
Don't get why the downvotes. Still gonna kick ass.

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mgkimsal
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
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.

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jwdunne
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
> _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".

~~~
jwdunne
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.

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juddlyon
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.

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nfriedly
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.

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

~~~
nfriedly
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 ;)

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CrystalLangUser
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.

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Daviey
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.

~~~
gt2
To this I say educate them.

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

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gt2
I meant educate them about running a technical product. By explaining the
landscape, you can also tell them how you can provide that service. Without
educating them, they don't know it exists. But since you allude to educating
them on how to run it themselves, I agree with the other reply to you that an
educated client is a better client. At least they will be happy you took some
time to educate them (within a scope of what's reasonable for a nontechnical
person), and they will possibly be disinterested/not up to the challenge and
hire you.

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JoshMnem
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
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.

~~~
JoshMnem
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.

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lexx
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

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jakobbuis
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.

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slice_of_life
> 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
> 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.

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mdekkers
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
What kind of websites are they?

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

~~~
mschuster91
Not for a managed hosting with 1-3h of allocated maintenance work plus HA
guarantee. It's cheap, for that level of service.

Either you want cheap mass hosting, then you have to live with support that
can only assist you with basic stuff (and most don't have any support other
than FAQ pages), or you pay more and get support that can actually help you.
For example, a hoster I know, when you go to them even with the most hipster
tech stack imaginable, they'll educate themselves on said technology and will
help you until the app is set up successfully.

~~~
mdekkers
Indeed, it is guaranteed HA and autoscaling, no hassles on peak traffic, and
dedicated maintenance work. It isn't cheap as such, but it is very price
competitive.

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halfeatenpie
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.

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ddingus
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.

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SomeStupidPoint
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!"

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rograndom
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.

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fyrstenberg
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.

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ephimetheus
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.

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point78
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?

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

