
Ask HN: (looking advice) building websites for local businesses (Side hustle)? - leonagano
I work with Java and at the moment looking for new job. In the meantime I’d like to work on some side hustle and have read some people here telling about creating websites for local businesses and maintaining them.<p>My idea is to cold call&#x2F;email local businesses in London (where I live) that have very old website and offer them a new one page website, easy to build and maintain.<p>What kind of hosting would you recommend for one page websites and suggestions on how to monetise other than one-off?
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mtmail
In my experience that space is dominated by Wordpress-based websites. Hosting
is easiest on wpengine, [https://getflywheel.com/](https://getflywheel.com/)
and similar. Ideally you charge a one-off fee for creating the website, then
ongoing maintenance fee. The big hosters have bulk-plans for 10+ websites and
take care of software updates, backups, caching, CDN etc.

Expect local businesses to be clueless about their wants and needs, especially
design, and in general being cheap.

Usual on-top services are SEO consulting, managing social media presence,
email hosting.

Good luck!

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coreymaass
To expand on maintenance, you can offer security audits and scans, plugin
audits before updating, site audits before updating (make sure updates won't
break anything), and a small number of tweaks or discussion every month.

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daleholborow
Why not Wix or Weebly etc.

Otherwise, smarterasp etc would readily handle low volume sites if you want to
roll heavily customised sites... But almost by definition, I'd recommend
against that. High work, low margin.

