How To: Define Website hosting packages
Tags: Hosting, Hosting packages, Web Hosting Business
Every web hosting company offers different hosting packages that are differentiated primarily on pricing and disk space alone. But do you know what kind of hosting packages are successful and popular amongst users?
These basic steps will help you define your own web hosting packages that will not only attract customers but also help you make more profits. Let’s first look at the three main factors that directly affect a customer’s decision while buying a hosting package from your company and also the amount of profit that you will make.
- Price of the package - One of the main factors that a customer would look at even before he/she may look at what you offer along with the package is the amount of money that you will be charging them. A difference of even $2 a month can impact a customer’s buying decision sometimes.
- Disk space - The next main factor is the amount of disk space that comes along with the package. For some, it’s not of great importance but for everyone else it makes a lot of difference.
- Bandwidth - Some customers are not very keen on the amount of bandwidth that comes along with a package but customers who are running bandwidth intensive websites will certainly look at the amount of bandwidth you offer.
Steps to define hosting packages
Step-1. Create three main categories of packages. Small, medium and large.
Step-2. Create small packages - The packages that we will create under the category ’small’ will cater to customers who wants to host their small/personal websites containing static htmls, low traffic websites that doesn’t need database etc. The amount of bandwidth and disk space required to host such websites is also small, so you may create upto 3 small packages, small1, small2 and small3 and then offer 3 different levels of pricing, bandwidth and disk space in each of those. For example - Small1 package could be priced at $2/month, offer 25MB space and 1GB bandwidth. Likewise, Small2 package could be $3/month, offer 40MB space and 1.5GB bandwidth and then Small3 could be $4/month, offer 60MB space and 3GB bandwidth a month.
Step-3. Create medium packages - The packages that we will create under the category ‘medium’ will cater to customers who wants to host their small/business websites such as static/dynamic htmls, CMS system, low traffic websites/forums etc. The amount of bandwidth and disk space required to host such websites is relatively small but definitely more than the requirement of personal websites. Create medium packages and offer different levels of pricing, bandwidth, databases and disk space under each package that you will define. For example - medium1 package could be priced at $5/month, offer 150MB space, 2 databases and 5GB bandwidth. Likewise, medium2 package could be $7/month, offer 200MB space, 5 databases and 6GB bandwidth a month.
Step-4. Create large packages - The packages that you will define under the category ‘large’ is to cater to the needs of medium to large businesses and individuals who have high traffic websites such as forums, corporate websites, photo gallery, video sites etc. Example packages - large1 could be priced at $9/month, offer 400BM disk space, 10 databases and 10 GB bandwidth. Large2 package could be priced at $12/month, offer 600MB disk space, 20 databases and 15 GB bandwidth a month.
For all the packages the common items could be email accounts, visitor analytics tools, log access, multiple FTP accounts etc.
I hope that steps mentioned above will help you define your own hosting packages and reap in profits. Please feel free to post your comments in the comments section below.
[tags]Hosting, Hosting packages, Web Hosting Business[/tags]
