Here's some hosting success stories I wanted to share as means of being inspirational to you if you're a newbie with hosting.
* In my town, I got a chance to work for a mean guy who started a web development business. He's brilliant with software, but has like no social skills and trusts his customers more than his own employees. The town is large and is filled with computerphobes. The nearby colleges teach "web development" on a Win 98 system running Personal Web Server, so you can say he easily outclasses most of the web developers in the area by far. Anway, while working there, I found he had a fractional T1 and was hosting about 60 sites, and was adding 1 more site every 2 months. He was not doing this aggressively because he was working on other projects, like a military project that involved special cameras -- something totally unrelated to web hosting. Anyway, I got an opp. to thumb through his books and found that he was charging these losers in town $400 a month for content and newsletter web hosting, and promised only to have high uptime and do about 1 major site change a year and 1 content update a month. Moreover, he reused a template over and over between customers, changing only colors and images.
>> Net of this is that it appears that in a large town with computerphobes in it, you could stand to overcharge considerably for webhosting and get away with it. Why haven't I done it? Well, I'm working on it. I have another day job now that ties up a lot of my time. I don't have the cash reserves and free time available to me now to get a fractional T1 and some leased office space downtown. But it's on the bootstrapping part of my future business plan, let me tell you.
* A political candidate approached me to make a website for him. Since he was a good friend, I decided to cut him an incredible deal. I only charged him $200. I designed a simplistic CMS with it and then set up my neighbor to collect a monthly income from him answering his calls, updating the website, etc. However, she called around to some of the other candidates who do have websites, and asked how much they paid. She found out it was a whopping $6,000 for nothing more than a 6 page content site (like haroldworley .com)! And that was even with no regular content updates except having to pay more fees! When I heard that, I said, "How many more political candidates do you know with no website? I can charge a little over half what this guy paid out and still make a decent profit with almost no effort."
>> Net of this is that political candidates will pay as much as $3K or more for 6 page content sites! And from that you can branch out to other classes of people and the sites they want to bring up. We're just starting this project and soon I may have other candidates calling me.
* In my town, I got a chance to work for a mean guy who started a web development business. He's brilliant with software, but has like no social skills and trusts his customers more than his own employees. The town is large and is filled with computerphobes. The nearby colleges teach "web development" on a Win 98 system running Personal Web Server, so you can say he easily outclasses most of the web developers in the area by far. Anway, while working there, I found he had a fractional T1 and was hosting about 60 sites, and was adding 1 more site every 2 months. He was not doing this aggressively because he was working on other projects, like a military project that involved special cameras -- something totally unrelated to web hosting. Anyway, I got an opp. to thumb through his books and found that he was charging these losers in town $400 a month for content and newsletter web hosting, and promised only to have high uptime and do about 1 major site change a year and 1 content update a month. Moreover, he reused a template over and over between customers, changing only colors and images.
>> Net of this is that it appears that in a large town with computerphobes in it, you could stand to overcharge considerably for webhosting and get away with it. Why haven't I done it? Well, I'm working on it. I have another day job now that ties up a lot of my time. I don't have the cash reserves and free time available to me now to get a fractional T1 and some leased office space downtown. But it's on the bootstrapping part of my future business plan, let me tell you.
* A political candidate approached me to make a website for him. Since he was a good friend, I decided to cut him an incredible deal. I only charged him $200. I designed a simplistic CMS with it and then set up my neighbor to collect a monthly income from him answering his calls, updating the website, etc. However, she called around to some of the other candidates who do have websites, and asked how much they paid. She found out it was a whopping $6,000 for nothing more than a 6 page content site (like haroldworley .com)! And that was even with no regular content updates except having to pay more fees! When I heard that, I said, "How many more political candidates do you know with no website? I can charge a little over half what this guy paid out and still make a decent profit with almost no effort."
>> Net of this is that political candidates will pay as much as $3K or more for 6 page content sites! And from that you can branch out to other classes of people and the sites they want to bring up. We're just starting this project and soon I may have other candidates calling me.
