Do you think a one-time payment of $5 for a free domain and WordPress blog would work

One time fee ?
Let alone the hosting cost that can be ignore coz you can have reseller plan for $10/yr with unmetered feature.
But the domain cost is too much coz .com domain price already surpass $5/yr.
Beside that,user will not trust you if their domain is still hold by you coz they will lose their hard earn reputation for their blog if you sell their domain.

 

Why would I sell their domain though? It'd be theirs and not mine.

Okay, then how about a one-time fee of $20? I'm only looking to have 1,000 clients for now.

 

Honestly, I think you should stop with the one time fees. If I were you, I would just charge monthly fees but lower prices such as $5/month. It's pretty cheap considering what your offering them.

 

Really? Because at least on DP, I see a lot of people charging like $1 or $5 a month for really big packages. They tend to get a lot of interest too.

By the way, does this look legitimate enough? I didn't want to go for the traditional hosting look with the pictures of the servers, etc.

 

Not too bad. So you want to oversell just like all the other hosts? Well, it's up to you really. I just think that in the long run, monthly payments would work much more effectively. Because what if the clients decide to stay for awhile and you end up having to get more servers? Where would you get the cash? The clients would only be paying a one time fee so suddenly just charging them monthly would just anger some clients and they would just leave. I mean, that's a lot of one time fee payments but how long would you be able to last. Would you be able to last 1-2 years on those one time fees if you have to constantly purchase more servers?

 

Well, like I said, I'd have advertisement in the control panels themselves, and I'd have like max 1,000 clients. So, all the advertisements would be both helping to pay and making me profit. The sites themselves wouldn't have ads.

And no, I won't oversell, I'll limit the plans to what I have.

 

It's not easy to see how you're going to make a profit out of it.

Also, I think that people wanting their own hosting for a Wordpress blog which is used for any business/commercial purposes want to do that for the security aspect of it (rather than using wordpress.com and not being in control of their own blog, I mean). So what your customers will be looking for is a well-established, secure, well-known service. Starting up is therefore going to be difficult, perhaps, regardless of prices.