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.
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.
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.
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.