On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 4:24 PM, Kent Parker <[email protected]> wrote: ... > Well at the end of the day I wasn't responsible for choosing either of > these hosting solutions for the given site. The client asked me if I > would manage his site but I declined because I don't consider myself > to be a professional webhoster and because of his past previous record > of choosing webhosts (in which case his suggestion I do it is > relevant!). I'm only prepared to sell my services as a php dev and > not a linux dev.
This is a problem for both developers and customers. If you're selling hosting for $3/month you don't have any margin to provide hand-holding. If you build in enough margin to provide the hand-holding your customers will baulk at paying. It's really bad for hosting companies as customers are going to want to run a wide mix of software so you need to train your staff on supporting all sorts of obscure software. If you are a developer & hosting your own customers' sites you at least only have a severely limited toolkit to support. For your customer it probably all seems so simple to park their site on a hosting company's server ... the hosting company's promotional material makes it sound simple and as my experience shows, even experienced computer people can be fooled into going with an off-spec hosting company. What hope has a computer non-technical customer have? Somewhere along the road you need to decide if you are a developer or a site-manager. Can you provide enough extra value to your customers and enough revenue to yourself to make it worth your while to not only develop their sites but manage them as well and make it look like a winning proposition for them? If you decide you are not a site manager, how do you express this to your customer so they don't expect you to sort out their site at nocturnal-aviation-hosting.ru? Bruce -- Bruce Clement Home: http://www.clement.co.nz/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/Bruce_Clement Directory: http://www.searchme.co.nz/ "Before attempting to create something new, it is vital to have a good appreciation of everything that already exists in this field." Mikhail Kalashnikov -- NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected]
