For something like 5G space, 20G bw there are offers allowing much more space-bw than that for around 4$ a month and special offers of 15$ a year. My question is what is the real cost price of that? Aware that hosts rely on selling people more than they require and thus making a profit. Guessing 15$ a year is less than cost price (used as a loss leader). I would prefer a host where I pay a little more than cost price, who are a long term operation making a profit and just quietly providing a service. Don't really want or need support. I have paid hosting for almost 10 years and the only support questions I write now are questions about why the service has broken. Therefiore would prefer no support (because none needed). I am currently trying namecheap but has not been great tbh. Anyone have a suggestion? Long established. Reasonably fast server. Close to zero downtime. Likely to continue just providing a stable service?
No one would be really able to define the ACTUAL cost of the plan you have specified. To check if the host is really doing some business, you might like to check out their infrastructure and a simple background check about their company and if they are just a reseller of some other host or if they own their servers and who is their data center and so on stuff. Now that we have 1TB drives at cheap space, the earlier disk costs are now almost gone. But still the CPU and Memory and Bandwidth would be still limited. Any host to be in very good profit would try to earn at least 2x or 3x of their expenses. So just calculate an average of 100 users a server and you should be able to arrive at the price per user and profit and stuff. P.S: We offer 5 GB Space and 50 GB Xfer plan at $3.95 a month here and been in business since 2005. Thanks for looking.
OK, that's the direction I am looking for. So I would be looking at the cost of a server with 500GB space plus the cost of 5000GB bandwidth. Divide by 100. That would get the actual cost price. Will hunt a bit further to get my answer. I imagine such a server can be bought for $n, $2n and $3n. Further developing the questions - my direction of thinking: - Would it not be good to offer seperate packages 1. with "breakdown-support" - ie for experienced users you process only support requests along the lines of "srver is down 30mins" plus (never necessary because never happens) feature of cpanel not working correctly 2. with full support - ie questions on how do I install an add-on for drupal are catered for. Obviously 2 should cost much more. I am guessing more than 2x, 3x margin you mention since the support has a big cost. I would expect 1. could be sold at much less than a 2x, 3x mark up. - Two things I miss on many offers here are: A. How long they've been in business. B. Payment methods. I once had a host who after paying them only 1 year on a cc and cancelling correctly at end of year tried to take money from my cc for the third time THREE year later costing 3 or 4 more letters to get UK cc to chargeback. I therefore prefer paypal! Will look at the offers mentioned.
Totally agree with this and am inclined to give your service a try anyway. I suspect prices of 3x for the same features is related to country of origin rather than service level. I would pay for the latter, not for the former. My first stop is a simple whois to verify length of being in business. You passed that although both your domains expire within 3 months. [assume you know that?] Second stop would be to look at what servers or data centre are being used. How can you find this out - verify independently? Ditto what supplier of bandwidth? More complex, the host I used for years was super reliable - is there any way to find out what data centre - bandwidth provider they were using for my sites say 2 years ago? Pretty sure it changed when the host changed hands since when uptime has dropped well below 99.9% on several months which had never happenned before. Easy way for me to look for a host now would be to restrict to those using that service. Looks like what everyone else does is just try one == big hassle when it goes wrong. Am already thinking go down that road but set up two of the cheaper ones so a switch can be made fast with nameserver change. Actually making an informed choice still seems a better route though.
It would be good idea to offer separate plans but only if the costs for the full support plans would increase that way and few may feel it hard and the host may lose the customer but instead, as the share would be more of such that the clients would be of some knowledge, the questions would be decreased as they keep checking out the things. Also hosts maintain Knowledge bases and offer Flash tutorials to show clients on how to use the things and this surely decreases the need for human interaction basically unless the things fail. PayPal is good as long as there are no issues but if there is an issue it would be bad for both the buyer and the seller but it is so far the convenient mode of payment processor for all. Thanks for your wise decision. The 3x the price for the same features would mostly be due to the service levels rather than origin of country unless the server costs / datacenter costs are really high. As you might have known that data centers in Asia Pacific charge more than those of US / UK. The more amount you might like to pay would result you in better quality support. Yes, we are completely aware of that and we renew our domains always 30 days before the expiry. And as you can see that we started in 2005, you can be sure that a company with these many years in business would not just close down that way You can look at where the servers are hosted from the WHOIS again under Server Data. IP Location United States - Georgia - Atlanta - Global Net Access Llc Code (markup): This clearly shows that we have one server with GNAX and they operate under AtlantaNAP data center brand. Many hosts prefer to have their servers in more than one data center which you can find out easily as well but i do not like to disclose it here on how to. If you like to know, please PM me. Just check the tie ups the data center has. All data centers have multi homed bandwidth and list their bandwidth providers on their website. But i don't really think you would need to check this unless you are having most important mission critical applications running on. You can find this as well as most domain researchers offer this as a paid service. You can track about the IP changes and DNS changes as well for quite a number of years. From IP you get data center and from DC, you get bandwidth provider. Do your research well. It may take time, but you would be happy later on. After all moving account(s) across servers is a real big head ache.