10. Hosting & Support, Good or Bad?
8January 24, 2014 by Joel_Hughes
Freelancer, podcaster and (roll of drums!) speaker at ‘The Business of Web Design‘ conference* in July, Sean Johnson asked this the other day:
Quick poll for webby people who provide clients with a complete web design & build service, do you provide hosting too?—
Sean Johnson (@seanuk) January 16, 2014
This is a great question and one which I’ve seen crop up time and time again. Everyone has got their own particular angle so here’s my 2p.
Hosting
From day one I decided to host because I liked the idea of recurring revenue. It’s all well and good winning project work but one month you’re working 5 projects and the next you’re doing diddly squat; that’s a lot of peaks and troughs.
My reasoning with hosting client’s sites was that the recurring monthly revenue (I prefer monthly rather than annual) will, given time, add up to something. And that something can help smooth out the troughs between the peaks.
Did it work out for me? Well yes…and no.
Considerations
If you’re mulling whether hosting is right for you then here’s a few things to chew over:
Have you got the skills?
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no server admin but I know my way around a linux box. Editing Apache config files, SSH, restarting, trouble shooting file permissions, getting SSL working, getting MySQL backed up, DNS etc, I can do. So I was happy I had the basics covered.
Many of my client’s sites are hosted at Memset; in particular I like their virtual servers; many folk’s sites are pretty low traffic which means you can fit a lot on one.
My company tends to work a lot on WordPress now and I’ve also been impressed by WP Engine, dedicated hosting just for WordPress with lots of bells and whistles thrown in. Managed WordPress hosting suits me as you don’t have to worry about patching it all the time (admittedly that has got easier recently anyway).
Managed Options
Now if getting your hands dirty on the linux command line is not your thang then why not looking at something like Heart Internet. Heart’s reseller hosting is pretty cheap and offers lots of one click install stuff. Plus their support department seems pretty on the ball to me.
Note: just for the record, I’m not on commission with Heart, WPEngine or Memset. Those aren’t referral links!
(Oh, and take a look at what I’ve written in the p.s. section at the bottom as well…)
How Much Should I Charge?
Ah! The eternal question! You’re providing a service. You’ve found a best of breed hosting solution, you’ve configured it and installed the website…this needs to be factored into your pricing.
What else are you providing? Firewall? O/S updates? Database backup? Load balancer? Replicated server?
This all needs to be paid for.
Your starting point in price calculation is obviously what you’ve got to shell out to the hosting company , if you’re not making money on it then there is no point.
But what IS included in hosting?!
And this is where you have to be careful. There is no point whatsoever getting (say) £100 a month for hosting a client’s site if they take up so much time that it costs you £500. So the answer is to carefully ring fence what is hosting & what is support.
Everyone will have their own definition but I try to draw the line as follows:
Hosting is the physical server and basic tasks to keep the web server up and running. Hosting includes X amount of (say) office hour* support to help ensure the web server is running. Client’s typically never had to contact about this as, if there is a web server issue; I’ll know about it before them.
Hosting does not cover application support (which means ensuring the website is running) or help with a CMS.
Support can be more about being responsible for the actual website. Depending on what you’ve agreed you may be helping with the CMS, updating the website core files (e.g. if it’s WordPress) or performing X amount of changes at no extra charge.
As you can see from the above; you really really need to be clear with the client as to what is and what is not included in your hosting & support. In my experience, if you are NOT clear on this then you’ll end being out of pocket and the client will still be peeved as you are not jumping when they ring every 5 minutes.
Clarity
As usual, it’s up to us to ensure that the client is crystal clear about:
- What you consider hosting & support to be
- What you are prepared to support (and what you are not)
- What conditions might invalidate support (e.g. third party fiddling around!)
- How they should contact you with support issues
- When they can expect a response from you
- How much time they can expect you to spend on their issues
- What happens if that time is used up
- etc
Assumption is the mother of all disasters so being clear saves a load of grief.
From early doors I’ll present the client with hosting / support options. They don’t have to host with me but I make it clear that if I do not host then I typically cannot offer any support on the basis that we do not control the hosting environment and cannot guarantee what state it is in. This is to avoid some plank (on behest of the client) mucking up the server and expecting muggins here to clear up their mess free of charge. In the words of Alan Partridge: no way jose.
SLA
I’ve never signed a formal SLA (Service Level Agreement) re support but, like with most things, you’ve got to take these things seriously otherwise you’ll let clients down. One area I was nervous about was holidays. My company set up is that I’m the only employee but I’ve got a trusted network of freelancers who now do more of the clever stuff. I tend to field support emails so will get a member of my team on the case as and when.
Issues could arise if I were on holiday, in those circumstances, I need to make sure the support system is a bit more proactive. I’ve used ticketing systems such as Zendesk but I’ve not quite found the right fit yet. I’m after something which I can use intermittently and can easily change who is or isn’t agent; better still, being able to assign when an agent is on duty would be cool. However, I manage my client’s expectations well and, truth be told, they simply do not pay the kind of money where I need someone manning the support helpdesk 24×7 (I do offer that high end service to clients, just to scare them with the price ;)
Closing Remarks
So, if you’re mulling hosting & support, I hope that’s given you some food for thought. If you have any questions, please shout out below.
If you are hosting/supporting and have got some ideas to add, please also speak up.
Peace.
Joel
p.s. I’ve always thought that another option (especially for folks in my situation) is to have a third party supporting agreed issues. Well, guess what, it looks like Adam Griffiths is doing such that at hostingandsupport.co – details on the website are thin on the ground so Adam emailed me with some more info:
Here’s why I wanted to start hostingandsupport.co: Basically, I knew a bunch of developers that wanted to provide hosting and/or support contracts to their clients but were either too busy to do it, or didn’t want to deal with keeping a server online or ‘silly questions’. The service I am providing basically lets people start a recurring revenue stream that needs almost 0 input from themselves. A win-win.
What I’ll do is: update the site software each month, whether the site is hosted with me or not, I’ll back the site up if hosting with me and I’ll monitor sites for downtime. If the site goes down at 3am, hosting with me or not, I will help to put it back online.
The whole point to this really is to take a task that some developers & designers don’t want or aren’t quite sure how to provide and let them provide a good service to their clients. This should also help them boost revenue and maybe one day buy a boat! :)
Ok that sounded quite martkety didn’t it? I essentially won’t be doing anything someone wouldn’t already be doing as part of a support contract. I’m trying to relieve some people from doing this so they can do what they love (and earn more money), and on the other side of the coin help people who don’t or can’t offer this service to offer it and to boost their overall revenue.
Sounds good eh?
p.p.s apologies for the long p.s. ;)
*Website and speakers for ‘The Business of Web Design’ conference in July will be announced by the end of month.
I was a Linux sysadmin in a previous life but I still have not provided hosting for years. I can’t see how you can make any decent margin unless the volume is high. I also lost count of the times a client quibbled over – say – £300 a year hosting even though they’ve just paid £5k/£10k+ for an app.
These days we point them at a trusted supplier (no kickback) get them to pay the bill and then we’ll set it up on *their* kit, if the client wants it we then charge a small retainer to be their bridge to the hosting company should something go wrong *during office hours*. It keeps the lines of communication clear, we still get to add value with the skills that we have and the hosting company get to do what they are best at.
.
Hi Darren,
you sound like you’ve had your fingers burnt there…haven’t we all!
“I can’t see how you can make any decent margin unless the volume is high”
I hear you but you make money but having very, very clear guidelines as to what IS and what is NOT covered. I stumbled into hosting and made the mistake of expecting people to be ‘reasonable’ but that was foolish; you live and learn
I like to give clients a menu of hosting / support options – each one clearly defining what they get for that price band. It’s then their choice.
Joel
Hi Joel
Nice stuff, just tweeted it out.
“I like to give clients a menu of hosting / support options – each one clearly defining what they get for that price band.” would love to hear more about this kind of thing
Mat.
p.s. I meant to say that hosting also includes test servers and GIT, bug tracking, etc. We do host this and consider it a cost of sale. However, it’s definitely worth putting in your Ts&Cs that the test server may die at any point, that it’s not to be used as a backup server, the content may get wiped etc.
My clients tend to be people who aren’t able to set up hosting themselves, even with specific instructions. It would take much longer for me to walk them through it (and then fix it) than it is for me to simply set it up for them. I’m a reseller at ICDSoft for small sites – I’ve been with them over 10 years and they’re fantastic for what I need. I use WP Engine for large sites and currently have one professional and one premium account with them. They are great at being flexible with account creation and management; I highly recommend them, too.
Currently I’m mainly charging by the hour. This is working very well for me – most of my work at the moment is of the “how long is a piece of string” variety. I charge a little over cost for hosting and have never had a problem with it – both ICDsoft and WP Engine have excellent support. (ICDsoft’s support is slightly more responsive, most tickets are answered and solved within minutes.)
I have an agreement with what type of work I do (community management and tech support to users as well as tech support and development) and try to be completely open about how much time / money things will take.
I am looking for someone to cover holidays too – that’s been a concern of mine… And Joel, I use Freshdesk which has worked very well for me but I use it mainly for community management and tech support to site users (not the site owners). Otherwise I use email for clients as it’s simple to search and easier to file. I’d love to read about other ticketing systems!
Hi JJ,
many thanks for stopping by & taking the time to comment. Thanks for an insight into how you approach this.
Do you make any distinction between hosting & support?
How do you ring fence when is and what isn’t included in your support?
How do you manage client’s support expectations? (I.e. they always expect it NOW!)
Thanks again
Joel
p.s. thanks for Freshdesk tip; I do need to look at them all again
Yes – hosting to me is just paying for the hosting server. I only host clients and former clients (on the WP Engine accounts, only current clients with ongoing contracts as it’s billed monthly and can change month to month). None of my clients have the login to their hosting server, although I would definitely give it to them if they asked! But I would say (very nicely) that if they mess it up, I will charge to fix it. I might not be the person to answer these questions – I’ve never had that aspect of things go wrong.
Or I might be using the word hosting differently than you. I charge for WP updates and issues surrounding it (I’m looking at you, 3.7) and any edits unless they’re my mistakes and were made during the course of a project that’s already been paid for – and for the last one, even years later I’ll fix my own mistakes. So that sort of thing falls under support for me and, for the clients who are on ongoing contracts, that’s charged on an hourly basis. I did try having a yearly contract with one client which worked out ok, but I’m going to propose a rolling contract similar to the others this year.
I’ve never had a problem with support expectations either. I don’t have a huge client list and generally have an ongoing relationship with my clients, even the ones who might be considered “former clients”. Rather than it being something I’ve done right, I think it’s just that it’s dumb luck that it’s worked out. It helps that I work part time so tend to have time to fit things in as needed. Again, nothing ever has gone urgently wrong except the 3.7 update (a stupid thing I did years ago which shouldn’t have worked then, did work for years but stopped working in 3.7) but luckily I had the time to fix it. I do block out time for fixing any issues with updates because I’m somewhat paranoid (I think 3.5 gave me problems, too) but that took a bit longer than planned.
Actually, it’s probably a combination of the dumb luck I mentioned and the fact that I don’t work full time that’s kept me from having any real issues! Also, I have a group of clients (which includes my largest sites) that all work together and have vested interests in the others’ sites which makes things much easier, too.
So I guess my advice is to be lucky. :) (I do realise this is not good advice, which is why I’m so interested in these things!)
Ha! I love your sentiment and, whilst I trust luck, I tend to like some more solid terms & conditions and expectations of what is and isn’t covered for my peace of mind when dealing with the coal face of Clientdom. Still, if it works for you, then great :)
Thanks again for chipping in
Joel