Can I run this past you.

Not a bad idea to build up leads and business. What will you be charging for hosting ongoing? Are you reselling or have your own server? Depends what the profit margins are like on these too.

As for a four page site, maybe you could offer this as a choice from a selection of template designs. That way you could bang a site out in a few hours and you would be looking at something that would be profitable. If they want bespoke design or more pages then the costs increase.

Good luck!

Hi Mickey,

Yeah thank's for your reply, the ongoing hosting, I use 123 reg for example, that's pretty cheap. Do you have any advice on hosting?

I like the template idea, again a no brainer for the client and as you say, would be very quick and cost effective.


Cheers

Depends how technical you are, how much you will charge per year after the initial year and whether you want a gamble!

1 and 1 do a "value" server for something like £30 a month - I run a few bits of mail through one and use it for messing about on. It has an uptime of over two years so can vouch that they are reliable machines! So if you charge £10 per month hosting you would only need three clients and the rest would be profit.

Of course, if you rent a server then it is your problem if it gets hacked or goes offline etc...

Reseller accounts from the likes of Fasthosts let you rack up a load of sites so could be another option if running your own server does not sound like something you want to get into! Not sure if 123-Reg do reseller packages or not but have a quick Google to see what others are out there.

When looking at this kind of low profit model you would do well to look at costs to make sure you get every pound possible as extra profit but my advice is do not skimp too much on the hosting as if you rack up 50 of these sites then can you imagine the pain in the arse you would have if a host went down and you had 50 punters calling you at once to see where their site had gone?

Hi,

that's great, very useful, I hadn't really looked into the hosting side of things, but you've given me some great advice, thank you.

Mike

Another option is co-location.

Buy your own server and then co-locate it at a data centre. You then have full control of the server and can upgrade it as required. The downside is that if it goes wrong it is up to you to get it fixed.

The main positive with co-location is flexibility, you are flexible to modify your server hardware as and when required and you can also increase/decrease the bandwidth available to the server as and when required.

If you are interested in co-location and want to discuss it just PM me.