Hi All Hopefully your going to get the point of my question here. I have a couple of accounts with a hosting company, I pay on average about $15 per month to have my accounts hosted. During a normal month I must spend a few hours discussing what I perceive to be issues. I will have either set up an account that’s now not working or the server may be down. At what point do I become an uneconomical client for the hosting company to deal with. I must be a major drain on there resources. If you have a hosting company how do you deal with people like me? I guess as time goes on I get a better understanding of the way things work and I should in theory become less of a drain on these people. As I get more sites and packages together its more money for hosting that will end up being put into the company. If all goes well you could argue that their patience has paid off. You could also argue that I may well be out of business tomorrow and have totally wasted their time. What’s your views on this?
thinking that it would be good to have customer like you who help resolve all the bugs so that they can provide good service as hosts and that the customer is happy. who are you currently using? if you don't mind that we ask this.
Hosts have a restriction in the CPU saying you can't use X% CPU for more than Y seconds. As long as your within that, your fine. Take a look at us if you wish, we have an offer open for 77% and free transfer. Start a chat with a rep for more info.
In the web hosting business, you are talking about volume rather than looking at individual customers because overall, majority of the customers would probably not post more than 1 or 2 tickets a month. In the past, I did consider running my own hosting company but I found that the profit margin to be relatively small. Say even if there is no fees or cost to hosting any site, $15 a month would just round off to be about 50cents a day. That is pretty much below minimum wage in most country. If you factor in hardware, utility bills, salaries and any other things, this would inevitably bring down profits per customer to a couple of cents a day. However, like I said at the offset, it is all about volume. If you bring in Pareto Principle of 80-20 then you get 80% of your customers who do not complain and are model customers and 20% who require constant support. It would inevitably be on too bad since support would be geared towards the group which needs support and the profits from the 80% would be used to fund the 20%. In real life, since the web host is offering a service, they would inevitably need to service you even at the point of being ineconomically to do so but within the boundaries laid down in the Terms of Service and other contractual agreement. So basically if the TOS states that they do not support 3rd party scripts or provide How-to for basic things like setting up emails or how to ftp then they are not obligated to help you in those areas.
Like what I was saying, with web hosts, you are talking about volume and thus that is the way to keep the profit margin up. If you look at single customer at a time, the physical profit per customer would be low.
Thanks for the reply guys. Hopefully I'm going to be coherent. I shouldn't come on here when I'm not 100% sober! I'm really surprised by the replies. I was half expecting to be told I'm a pain and people like me cost hosting companies money. I'm with Axis Host at the moment. Generally they are OK. I have had my moments with them but things seem to be running OK now. I was just wondering if there was an industry term or ruling for people like me. Thinking about this I guess it could be compared with health insurance. There will always be the very sick people that need a lot of attention who get a lot more back than their premiums and there will be those that pay but never get ill. Thanks James
If your sites are down then the host it's at fault you are having to spend so much of your and their time if it's your fault you can't get your sites online because of things the host has no control over then it would be be like someone said above not something covered by the terms of service like ftp loading or some such like. Sounds to me though as though they do not want to lose your $15 a month but servers being down that is a hosting companies problem 99% uptime minimum or better still 99.9% uptime should be something you really want to look at keeping hold of.
I did only one thing, pay more for good hosting provider. I am paying 5 times as before, and same price for my customers. I get almost no complain now.
What you mean is revenue not profit, now deduct the support and sales salaries, advertising and dealing with random acts of stupidity ...