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Would you buy Shared Hosting for $5?

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TotallyServ

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2012
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Hi guys,

Just wish to run a discussion to see where we are at in the community.

Would you rather buy $1 hosting, or would you spend that little extra and possible get better service?

Is $5 for:
5GB Diskspace
Unmetered Bandwidth reasonable?

I see a lot of hosts starting at $1 etc.
 
11 comments
@ Samar: Are you a advertiser? Did you even read the first post?

@ TotallyServ: Unmetered bandwidth turns away few people. As it amounts for over-selling.
$5 for 5GB is reasonable provided you keep top notch support and uptime.
 
Stay on topic guys! The OP is asking whether you would buy 1$ host or 5$ host with your reasons for the decision. The OP is not looking for a host for his site. :|

@ Topic

I always prefer quality, doesn't matter if i need to pay few more bucks. Also, i know where those few extra bucks should stop and what is a good price.
 
I think it matters to only new customers/webmasters because they don't know what is best and would get swayed by the price.
For established/experienced web-masters... well they know which hosting is good by their experience of observing other people's experience...
So I think the question here is who you want to make your customer as? Newbies or established ones.
Newbies - go cheap
Established - price according to your profits/costs
Although if you are a new entrant in the market, it would be recommended to set your price low. That's what I am doing, offering cheap despite best quality ... right now I am selling hosting at slight loss.. but its required to survive and make place for myself.

I don't know how good you are doing or how long you have been in the market.
You could observe your reports, like how many customers extend hosting, how many leave. If most(>80%) leave, then you need to go cheap, something is either wrong with your service or price.
If most renew, then you can keep your price or even consider increasing.

Hope this helps to you and other webmasters.
 
You have some great points. I will never lower the pricing of my shared hosting as I believe quality comes at a cost and, by offering hosting for $1.99, you are attracting the wrong kind of customers (you'll find they submit more support tickets) then a client paying $4 - $10 for a Shared Hosting plan.

I believe there will always be a market for Premium Shared Hosting, and whether it takes me longer to get the customer, after all, we offer the trial which they can use.

As you stated, newbies go cheap, and I think thats why a higher level of support is required.

When you break it down, a month is 4 weeks... and $1.99 for some hosting is less than a piece of bread you would eat for breakfast really. Just my opinion.
 
Just imagine . A webhosting company which atleast need minimum configuration of

Xeon Server
8GB RAM
2x1TB HDD with Minimum of RAID 1 Partition
1Gbps Network Line Or Atleast 100Mbps Line . With minimum of 25-50TB Bandwidth per month
cPanel License + Auto Installer


These all costing around 145Euros/mo. I WOULD think this much is minimum requirement.

For this server even if he adds around 60 shared hosting clients . Then he needs to set the minimum plan price as 2.5Euros. Here on WJ you will find some shared hosting providers claiming only 1$ , 1Pound promising quality service. At the end of the day its just overselling.

My Points on Better Hosting Providers:

1) Must be in Business for atleast more then 2 years
2) Judge the support members through their way of speech.
3) Checkout the resource provided for the prices added on their website.
4) In Addition with Live Support, Ticket Support. See whether they have working phone support
5) Crosscheck in who.is whether they have disabled their privacy or not . If its enabled , Surely they are not going to stay longer in business
6) Check whether they are registered company or not with physical address on the website.
7) Imp One: Make sure read their terms of service and confirm with them which country DMCA Laws they follow.

These are all basic requirements you need to know before ordering. Hope this will help many newbies.
 
JeoRocker said:
Xeon Server
8GB RAM
2x1TB HDD with Minimum of RAID 1 Partition
1Gbps Network Line Or Atleast 100Mbps Line . With minimum of 25-50TB Bandwidth per month
cPanel License + Auto Installer
Click to expand...

That is pretty low actually. RAID10 on quality drives(SAS preferred) is a must for web-hosting servers. Otherwise, I/O will be trashed real quickly.
 
@JeoRocker

There are however exceptions to it:

My Points on Better Hosting Providers:

1) Must be in Business for atleast more then 2 years New ones often are more innovative.. unlike old ones
2) Judge the support members through their way of speech. Many aren't from English speaking countries yet they provide quality services
3) Checkout the resource provided for the prices added on their website. You can't only judge by that, you have to actually consider the quality, ticket respoonse times, uptime, server speeds/etc
4) In Addition with Live Support, Ticket Support. See whether they have working phone supportThis might be useful only to people who need frequent support


Rest all I agree :)
 
As mentioned by someone earlier, newbies prefer cheap hosting.
I myself used to buy cheap hosting(initially even free hosting) when I started. A few of them ran away and some had downtime issues. I then increased my budget gradually and found the services and support even better than my previous cheaper host.
I am currently with $10 per month hosting, its doing its best.

I also want to add that its always better to start with a cheap dedicated server rather than a VPS.

So, in my opinion you can start out with $5 per month without any hesitation. You'll get less but quality clients (who won't bug you for useless support). You can offer some coupon codes sometimes if you encounter clients who want to pay less.
 
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