UK Web Host. No. 2 on Yahoo.co.uk. Unique site and content.

HostForCharity is a unique web hosting business in that half of every customer's web hosting fee is donated to charity. We have a contract with a well known UK charity to do this. The remaining half of every monthly payment is essentially profit.

The site now requires investment in advertising to become widely known. The unique nature of cause-related marketing should result in a large sales boost from this. The investment in advertising, together with the lack of current revenue is the reason for the low start price. The site has huge potential if it can be successfully marketed. While the site and its servers are based in the UK, customers can of course be in any country worldwide.

Search Engine Rankings

The site is highly ranked on both Yahoo.co.uk and MSN.co.uk, after extensive SEO has been applied to the site over the past 6 months.

On Yahoo.co.uk it is currently at No. 2 out of 30,500,000 for the phrase affordable web hosting, which is one of the most popular web hosting phrases typed into search engines. It is also No. 7 and No. 9 for the phrase charity web hosting.

On Msn.co.uk it is at No. 6 for affordable web hosting.

When the site emerges from the Google sandbox hopefully it should be highly ranked there too. It currently is ranked for less typed phrases on Google.co.uk such as charity host, where it is at No. 7.

Web Hosting Company

It is up to the buyer whether they wish to buy Website Hosting Ltd., which has the contract with a leading UK charity to donate half of the money it receives to it, or whether to just own the domain names (HostForCharity.co.uk and also HostForCharity.com are included), and the site's content. You would then need to obtain an agreement with a different charity of your choice.

Website Hosting Ltd. is a registered UK limited company (no. 6095514) and the buyer would be responsible for any legal costs for the transfer of ownership. The company is included in the price and so if the buyer does not wish to take over it, it would be dissolved.

Revenue and Costs

The site uses a reseller account from a large UK web hosting company in order to provide the hosting service. This is completely white-label and their name does not appear anywhere on the user control panels etc. They are all branded with the HostForCharity name, or are generic designs (such as the domain control panel). Support emails can just be forwarded to their support team who respond quickly.

The reseller account costs £40 ($80) a month, for which you can host unlimited web sites, with unlimited features (such as bandwidth, databases etc.). User accounts are activated instantly and are ready to use immediately. The PHP code that runs the site is unique and custom written.

Payment is currently handled though a merchant account payment processing company, with its API integrated into the payment page. Since the merchant account can not be transferred to the winning bidder, if the buyer can not obtain their own then the site could be adapted by them to work with other providers, such as PayPal.

With just 100 customers signing-up to the middle hosting package, at £4.99 ($10) a month (which is standard in the UK for the features included), this would create revenues of $1000 a month, and profits of roughly $420 a month. You would expect far more sales with sufficient marketing however.

The auction start price is $500, with a BIN of $2000.

Hopefully I have answered all your questions in the listing. If you have any other questions then please feel free to post them.

Thank you.

(This site is also for sale in the SitePoint marketplace)

 

any "existing" earnings?

 

Hi olaf2,

No, not at the moment. The site would be worth a great deal more then.

 

Update: Bids of $500, $600 and $700 received so far on SitePoint:

http://lessurl.com/bs