Billing for web hosting
Hi all,
I just finished building a static webpage for a local artist. She's been generous and sociable, paying me $100/hr for my work. Despite some reservations toward taking responsibility over other people's hosting, she's asked me for a monthly rate to host the site. Right now I'm looking at renting a basic Hetzner VPS for $10/month. This would come at the added benefit of scaling up over time for other clients.
I want to work toward establishing good business practices, and that means charging people fairly - i.e. never simply because I can. Aside from the cost of hosting, how do you measure the cost of responsibility over a static site? A one-time setup fee? Hoping for some input from people who have more business experience than myself.
Edit:
Part of the goal is to host multiple artist pages on the same site, and apply some server software I've developed that allows for event coordination etc. I need a VPS for that.
I've run this idea by my client, who is part of the art collective, and she's in favor of it. I'm going to charge $50 for setup
and $10/month for the first three months, then adjust in the new year based on how it's going.
If you’re running a full VPS then you’ll want to consider monitoring as well, and presumably breakfix for if something with the server or the site goes wrong. Then there’s also patching to consider, and associated downtime.
A static site isn’t likely to cause too much trouble, and Linux is pretty well rock-solid for hosting. So your overheads in time spent should be pretty minimal, but there are costs associated with setting up and maintaining a good monitoring stack.
And on the assumption that you aren’t charging for time spent fixing a broken server, you’ll wanna factor those costs into your rates too. It’s kind of a finger in the air sort of measure, until you can gauge how much of your time is being eaten up by this stuff.
Edit to add: looking after LAMP servers is bread and butter at my day job, so if you have any questions about the Linux/monitoring side of things, do let me know!
To date, I've never been failed by nginx as a delivery mechanism for static files. I've never considered official uptime monitoring though, so feel free to send some information my way so that I can make an informed decision about whether or not it's worthwhile for me.
The thing you want to care about more than uptime monitoring imo is payment method monitoring. My greatest shame (and I think about it all the time), was I set up a website for a friend and my card expired and I missed the email and the whole lot got nuked.
Hosting someone's site is a big deal. The tech is easy but they are entrusting you with the data, and when it's gone it's gone. How good are your backups, can you restore them blah blah.
There are a bunch of uptime monitors with free tiers. I like HetrixTools, their free tier includes multiple geographic locations.
If it's a static website and doesn't get much traffic, you might be able to host it on Cloudflare for free using Cloudflare Pages. I recently helped someone set up a website that way. The files get pushed to a Github repo and Cloudflare picks them up from there. (The website uses Eleventy for templates, so Cloudflare runs Eleventy to generate the actual html pages.)
This is a website with nearly no traffic, though. If you get traffic, I assume Cloudflare will want you to upgrade from the free tier.
Since neither of us were familiar with Cloudflare previously, actually figuring out how to do it required some AI conversations and fiddling. I didn't find the UI all that intuitive. Now that it's set up, though, updates are easy. Just edit the file on GitHub and wait a few minutes.
If you don't like Cloudflare, Netlify is another service I've used before that does a similar thing, and they also have a free tier. It's been a while, but I thought it was fairly easy to use at the time.
I don't know how much to bill for this sort of thing. It was for someone I know at no charge.
From what I've heard, it really is unlimited. They only start to get grumpy about it when you start hosting a bunch of videos.
Even then, I think the limit for assets you can upload to static projects is 25 MB per file or something. Really very generous. Incredibly convenient if you have an app that uses WASM binaries.
Or host the files on Cloudflare R2 (their S3-compatible service). It's free up to 10 GB.
I seem to remember there was a thread recently where somebody mentioned that they get something like 35k page views and still get free static hosting from cloudflare. If true, cloudflare sounds like it could be the perfect option.
I'll see if I can find the thread.
You're thinking of delphi getting 34 million requests a month with free cloudflare hosting.
Aw jeez that's me. Yeah that is on https://delphi.tools/
(Receipts here, btw. The drop off you see is me switching frameworks and no longer outputting chunked JS, which required multiple requests per page, so while that doesn't translate to clicks, 34M Requests was accurate for my strongest month. Cloudflare doesn't allow me to go that far back on the free tier, though)
Oh my, yup that was it! That's wayyyy more than I remembered haha
If it's actually a static site, then the hosting for those is essentially free nowadays. @skybrian mentioned Cloudflare Pages and Netlify, but also, for example, all the major git forges offer one (Github Pages, Gitlab Pages, Codeberg Pages), and there are many other options. A lot of cloud infrastructure companies offer it for free because it attracts customers and barely costs anything for them to serve static pages from their established infrastructure. They're also a lot easier to maintain than a VPS and automatically set up deployment from your git repo. I'd say definitely go with one of those unless you need to host some additional services that actually need a server.
As for billing, since the services themselves are entirely free, it just depends on how much regular updating of the site you'll be doing.
Part of the goal is to host multiple artist pages on the same site, and apply some server software I've developed that allows for event coordination etc. I need a VPS for that.
I've run this idea by my client, who is part of the art collective, and she's in favor of it. I'm going to charge $50 for setup and $10/month for the first three months, then adjust in the new year based on how it's going.
I just want to chip in to push back on some of the responses you got about it basically needing to be free. Of course huge vertically integrated cloud platforms can be much cheaper and afford it to lure in people for free.
That's exactly how they push out smaller companies and we end up with enshitification down the road.
One can argue about the setup fee but you will need to put in the time to set it up. 3.33 per month after is not expensive at all. Certainly very reasonable for a smaller operation like yours. I'd even consider it low from a certain perspective.
Do not forget to factor in your own labor for maintaining the vps though. You want to keep on top of updates and just generally keep an eye on things. Possibly also factor some future development adding extra things or monitoring you didn't forsee, etc.
I get that it isn't a extra service you are providing and not a main income stream. But making it sustainable for you to maintain and have room to act on unforeseen sysadmin work seems reasonable to me.
You seem to have misread their message.
They are charging $10/month, not $10 for 3 months, which is very expensive for static site hosting. Even $3.33 is expensive for what it is, but $10 is well into ripoff territory. Static sites have effectively 0 maintenance overhead, so this is purely a "I charge this because I can" fee.
OP deciding to use a VPS instead of a completely free option is on them, not the client.
Fair, I misread that. But, they seem to be open with the client about this and have gotten their agreement. Which, by definition doesn't make it a ripoff but makes it come down to valuing different things.
I think it's not unlike a person with 0 knowledge about cars being charged extra for an oil change. It's "worth it" to them because they can't realistically do it themselves, but if a garage down the road does it for half the price, the first one could reasonable be called a ripoff.
From the main post:
That's precisely what this $10 fee is though. It's not a fair charge. You'd have more trouble finding people to host your site for $10 than for $5 or less.
Of course, they can do whatever they want, it's a free market after all. However, since they explicitly posted here asking about the price, it's worth noting that it is without a doubt unreasonable.
Context matters. If one is run by a good local mechanic while the other is a large chain employing minimally trained crew making it only good for oil changes you might want to keep the first one around. Paying the premium because they can't afford to drop their margins that low is then not a ripoff.
If that is the case here, both of us can't really tell of course. But overall I strongly disagree with calling everything that is more expensive a ripoff as a matter of course.
I would agree context does matter. And OP seems to be picking the deliberately more expensive option. A mom and pop oil change shop is fine. But if they decide to only buy 1qt bottles of oil and pass the expense on to you, even though they could buy larger quantities from the same store, that is overpriced.
If OP wants to avoid AWS and Cloudflare, that is fine. There are plenty of other object storage providers that can host a static site for much less than $10.
Using a VPS instead of a "completely free" option is a mutual agreement between me and my client. Everything costs something, and if it's a "completely free" offering from a huge corporation then the cost incurred is (at best) to be complicit in their market capture.
I am dropping the monthly fee, though.
Hosting is not cheap because of huge cloud platforms, hosting is cheap because hosting is cheap. It's not the result of market manipulation, the resource needs of the majority of sites are genuinely tiny.
This is an industry decades into maturity, you don't need to be Amazon scale to offer cheap hosting. There are so many medium sized NOCs that have nothing to do with the big datacenter companies who will give you shared hosting for a couple dollars a month and a solid VPS for not much more. With far better uptime than you'll get from someone who's just getting started.
Meanwhile at small scale there simply can't be enough profit to justify engineer hourly rates. Server techs make much less than engineers hourly and a couple of experienced people can keep whole racks of servers running smoothly. Hosting makes profits via scale, each customer pays a few dollars a month and maintenance time is cheap when spread across all of those customers. Trying to force a few customers to pay for your server maintenance hours is unfair to both them and you.
Replying with this in mind:
The web is full of places where you can host small (even non-static) sites for free or for a monthly fee so small it's akin to free. Because of that, your proposed $10/month isn't even close to competitive. And a $50 setup fee! What is that paying for? Any competent web host has a provisioning script of some kind. It should take 30 seconds to setup an account, email, DNS, certificate, web space and permissions and maybe another 30 seconds for file uploads. If it takes longer than that, which is entirely understandable being new to hosting, that's not something the client should be paying for. Their monthly fee should cover everything, over time the host comes out ahead because most months a given hosting customer requires no time at all.
That wouldn't be true at first, because you'd be learning the intricacies of server management, but it's not the customers responsibility to pay for that. The comparison should be with the going rate for hosting, not your hourly rate for learning.
If I was working with someone and discovered they were paying $10/month for static site hosting, I would feel obligated to inform them that they're getting minorly ripped off. Minor because it's not a huge amount of money, but suspicious because it's many multiples of what they should be paying and therefore makes me question the motivations of the person charging them.
I'm not questioning your honesty, to be clear, just letting you know what I'd lean towards assuming if I had no context.
And I'm not saying don't host the site, it's useful to have full control over the server you're hosting client sites on, just don't try to make money from it. Charge something nominal or nothing at all. Your $10/month VPS could easily handle dozens of static sites with minimal ongoing hours invested on your part. Does it really make sense to charge each one of those $10/month when they could get equivalent hosting free, or for a dollar or two a month, somewhere else?
Web hosting is a mature, competitive and saturated market, banish all thought of it being a viable side business. The margins are too low. Instead, give your clients somewhere cheap and easy to put their sites and focus your energy on the other services you provide. If you're adding value on top of the hosting, charge for that separately and just throw in the hosting, amortized over a handful of clients it costs you basically nothing.
This is the type of post that I was hoping for.
If I have to eat the cost of web hosting in order to establish proper business practices, I will. Still, I have my hesitations about the long-term scalability and the amalgamation of responsibility.
There was a point where I was intending to walk my clients through how to set up a VPS so that I could hand them the keys and be done with it. However, that's kind of a waste of compute for a simple static page. I don't really want to offer hosting services long term (especially since I'm just going through an actual web host), and there was a time where I was planning on charging an intentionally high amount of money on the basis that I don't want to be responsible over other people's digital identity. Realistically though, when the alternative is for people to depend on companies whose ethics disagree with me (CF, GH) I think I'll do what people need of me to keep it simple.
I also agree with the premise of not making the customer pay for my learning. I've incurred some debt over the past few years of building up my skillset, but the value of that skillset should stand on its own. Having a steady stream of clients comparable to this one would be well worth it in the long run.
All said, I'm probably going to retain the $50 setup fee (this time) and drop the monthly rate. Thanks for your input.
If you're only providing hosting, then fine, don't charging for it is fine. However, if you're responsible for keeping the site up, things change. If Cloudflare passes through a outage, will your customer call for you? If something (anything) goes terrible wrong, will you restore the site from a backup? If any change were to be made, will you do that?
People don't pay for hosting, they pay to have peace of mind and be sure their website will be working as expected. Static sites are relatively simple to maintain, but they still require some maintenance. What I'd do if I were you: charge less than USD 10, but charge annually. (It's a bit ridiculous to charge, like, USD 2 every month.) And write a contract, if you haven't yet. A contract is pretty standard business practice and will save you from potential headaches down the line.
Best of luck with it, if you run into issues post again!
Side note: It's easy to switch people's sites to somewhere else if you get tired of hosting their digital real estate. It's not a forever commitment.
why not host the static site with CF or GH or whatever and then roll your event platform as its own thing on a decent VPS? Charge the client a flat monthly fee for maintenance that comes with 'free' access to the event platform.
bread and butter :)
Are you also paying for the domain name? In my experience the biggest hassles have been making sure the domain name stays registered and configured correctly (pointing to the correct IP, MX records if it's used for email, automated SSL certificate renewals, stuff like that). A good uptime monitoring service can usually be configured to alert you around all of those other things as well as let you know if your VPS goes down.
Personally I think the model I would go for if I were to get back into the hosting game would be an up front setup fee to cover domain registration and my time setting everything up, then a low monthly rate (with a slightly discounted annual rate if they pay for a full year) to help cover hosting and monitoring costs.
If you need a backup solution for your vps, my favorite is rsync time backup which gives you incremental backups that appear as plain files organized in folders by date and time of backup, like macOS. The incremental backups are all hard-linked to the full backup, so you can just copy and paste any of them like ordinary files.