Webhost Pricing

As well as selling normal webhosting and VPS services, we give users an address with which they can do faucets, surveys etc and use the free sats they get to pay for their hosting. Whether a user pays with their own bitcoin or uses the free bitcoin sites, the process is the same. Note, this is what we are aiming for; temporary compromises may be needed initially.

If we charge 2 dollars a month for hosting (shown in satoshi) then we need (calculated 21 Jul 2021 but usd rate will be the same):
2.00/month /30(days) = $0.075 per day = 236 sat per day.

  • For this they get full directadmin hosting unlimited emails etc.
  • Or for 50c more, a reasonably good VPS.
  • Time, approx 30 mins.
  • one typical survey would give enough for 2 to 5 days.
  • If they use our reflinks to sign up on the sites we get an additional 15 to 50%
freebitco.in     06 sat per claim    x 5 claims    = 030 sat
yannik.biz       10                  x 5             050
cointiply.com    08                  x 5             040
firefaucet.win   05 sat per claim    x 5             025
koiniom.com      1 visit ptc                         040
adbtc.top        1 visit ptc                         050
                                                     ____
 total daily                                         235

Intentions

 Differentiate means “to mark or show a difference”.  Many marketers don’t seem to know what “different” means. Note that we don’t need to make much profit on this, just enough to cover the costs of the ClickForCharity project. It could generate a lot more than that, but the primary purpose is to enable other things to happen directly instead of indirectly by first making money and then spending it on those things.

That purpose is to create enough users for the system to be able to provide the infrastructure needs of the ClickForCharity network, and its projects. This means progressing from Reselling to server admin, eventually big enough and paying for itself, to provide the hosting and other needs of our communities. Paying ourselves comes below that because we don’t deserve payment unless our work is helping to achieve the stated goals. Otherwise we might as well just run yet another boring hosting company.

  • We can add a small mark-up to cover those costs
  • while we create the first projects, that mark-up can help to fund their creation.
  • We remain “non-profit” simply by spending all excess revenues on the clickforcharity projects, either as payments to coders etc or as direct support to a project.
  • Paying customers know that instead of just giving profit to some company somewhere, they are providing the network and development needs of the ClickForCharity projects.

If the actual costs (accounts, not pretty summaries) are public (without identifying users real ID) then it should all work fine.

Pay only for what you use.

The figures below are to give an idea of how it will work when we have automation. For now we have a single basic “plan” with limits and then charges for use above those limits.

Bandwidth2c / GB
Disk Space20c / GB
??

We’re currently charged $9.99 a month for 1TB of traffic. This translates to 1.5c per GB if we guesstimate the other costs. We can charge people [daily/weekly/hourly?] in arrears. They must have a minimum in their account to cover at least a normal month. Customers pay x minimum deposit, and as soon as their balance goes below x/2 (or self-set amount?) they get email warning.

The disk space they use can also be charged for. If we design it well it need not look any more complex than the plans the other hosters provide. There may be problems like when a site gets ddosed. DDOS protection can be included. If they get busier than they expected, they get a notification. They probably will be pleased to get busy. If they get very busy and still want cheap, they can go to hostgator and suck their bandwidth (see how long that lasts!).

We can add bandwidth to our account at a rate of $3 per TB per month.

Users can…

  • top up by as much as they like whenever they like.
  • check their stats page whenever they like. This needs to be good so they can see easily where money is going.
  • see charts showing the usual bandwidth etc but also a chart showing clearly how much they are in credit, and after a while, maybe an estimate of how long that will last. 
  • close account and withdraw remaining balance (minus mining fees) at any time.
  • see our full, unedited accounts, plucked from blockchain and our own system, presented in the site in an intelligible format (minus any usernames). 

What’s wrong with plans?

Plans suit ISPs not users. If you get a phone plan you are losing out. If you go over the plan amount you get penalised with excessive charges and if you go under it you’re paying for more than you used. Either way the ISP gets more than it should.

ISPs want you to pay fo rmore than you use. This can be seen by their behavior, for example they don’t like torrents because these use a lot more upload bandwith than most normal uses. Instead of being honest and charging for what you use, they prefer to pretend they have “unlimited” upload on their plans. Then when users try to use their “unlimited” upload bandwidth, ISPs try to punish them. See, for example South Korean ISP ‘Infected’ Torrenting Subscribers with Malware. This shows the lengths they will go to in order to keep their “plan” pricing model.

If you’re only paying for what you use you have more control over what you pay. You can take steps to minimize file sizes for example, to reduce your resource useage. See also the Expanded Blurb section below for more reasons to pay as you go!

Sign-Up

  • Choose an example (our equivalent of a plan)
  • Choose a username
  • enter an email address
  • Enter the usual domain details
  • Click “open account”

The system then creates a cPanel account for them.

How to pay.

This is a selection that users make on sign-up, but it can be changed at any time.

  1. Use a unique satoshihost wallet address to do faucets, surveys etc. (if we use transaction IDs instead of addresses this will have to change.)
  2. A page showing their current balance and a field where they put in the amount they want to pay (with field to fill which must be more than x) which then generates a bitcoin  link and image code which opens their wallet with the payment and comments pre-populated for them to send. If we use transaction ID instead of unique addresses, a field for them to enter the tx id will be here as well.
  3. Lightning network. Could we make a script they can run to automatically send x sat per [time] into their account? (no, the world is not ready for that)

We could add a donation field with an amount they fill in themselves (can make it a required field so they have to put in zero if they are not going to donate). Although the price is pegged to dollars, because our bills are in dollars, the amounts in this form are in BTC.

The system can periodically check their usage and deduct an amount from their balance.

Blurb

No matter what your needs, just sign up for the basic package, either annual or monthly payment. The allowances that come with this standing charge are sufficient for about 99% of websites in the world. If you think you’ll need more, simply add more to your account, you’ll not be charged more unless you use more, so the excess will cound against your next standing charge.

**to do** – All we need to add here is a schedule of charges for resources used beyond the standing charge.

Expanded Blurb

A modestly popular blog with 1000 visitors per day, a 100 kb page size, and 2 page views per average visitor will only need about 8.5 GB of bandwidth per month. Many sites use far less than this. In a typical shared hosting environment, there will be 90% of sites using less than 10GB, a few busier ones, and just one or two using up most of the server’s bandwidth.

According to hostingmanual.net, 99% of websites currently on the web use no more than 5 GB of bandwidth a month. So why pay for more? Why pay for someone else’s bandwidth?

Below are some answers to a question I posed about this on webhostingtalk.com:

Our average is about 32 megs per month per account (including addon domains). Most domains use 0-1 meg, while there’s about 10% that use the majority of the traffic. I’d guess this would be fairly similar across the board. Most clients don’t use much at all, while a small percentage make up for that.

Each user usually uses very little bandwidth. Even our busier customers don’t even come close to using much.

Most of our customers use below 1GB, as a matter of fact, most use below 500MB as well. But there are a few who consumes a lot, like on one server we have a software company whose BW usages accounts for 98% of the total BW consumption on that server.

I think this is common with most hosting platforms. I also have a large streaming business… Some servers sit there with nobody even connected or broadcasting to them. The majority have 1-20 listeners. Then we again have about that top 10% that DO get the listeners and use up enough traffic for everybody else. In an odd way it really evens itself out. I see the same trend in web hosting services and VPS as well.

Think of it this way… If everybody consumed 100% of what was offered, nobody would be able to offer what they offer. It’s like taking the average client at a buffet restaurant and comparing them to the guy that sits there half of the day and eats 500 plates… Or something like that.

We have a pricing system that is fair to all users. Those few who don’t like fairness can go somewhere else.

Big providers are all mouth and no trousers. Their “unlimited bandwidth” is true, but they use tricks to reduce your usage in other ways. See this quora article for a start (pdf attached below). Hosting providers do this because it’s easy, and they get away with it because everyone is doing it. We have a tool to disrupt them with. It’s called Bitcoin. They might accept bitcoin payments but they can’t use its full potential.

Domain Registration

We recommend our users to register domains themselves on porkbun. They are reputable and it is always a good idea to have your domain registered by a different company than your web hosting provider. Then if you fall out with the hosting provider you can go elsewhere and simply point your domains to the new provider without having to argue with the existing provider. Here is a good list of things you should know before registering a domain.

Competition (Similar sites)

Speculations

Assume 40c per month per account is profit, assuming that’s the base price we set, excluding bandwidth. that’s 40 dollars per 100 users, per month. More than this will make us uncompetitive on price. It’s already more than the likes of GoDaddy appear to charge. 1,000 users already provide enough for one person to live comfortably on, so long as they don’t live somewhere stupid like Europe.

Our offerings include:

  1. Web Hosting
  2. VPS Hosting
  3. Specialized VPS (e.g. Gaming)

In both paid and ‘free’ versions. Between these, I think it’s quite reasonable to expect 2,000 users fairly quickly after setting up. (Come on, that’s the kind of shit people say in in cash flow forecasts, they just make it look more professional.)

Who will we attract and who not?

  • people who are willing to make an effort to save some fees. When their site gets busy they will cut down the size of their files, because who needs 5 MB jpgs?
  • The people who understand our system and are happy to pay more as they grow.
  • The lazy people who feel entitled to something-or-other will complain when the price goes up because they are using more bandwidth. Do we really want to deal with such people?

Plans For Those Who Like Them

We can provide a plan for those who like plans. That won’t detract from our differentiation at all. We can offer what I do already, 30 dollars a year within limits, more for more. Dealing with credit cards and banks though is another matter. We must be the change we want to see in the world. We do not accept clunkycoins.

The present reseller account has “unlimited accounts” for 120 dollars per year. I have 25 accounts on one plan. At 30 per year each that is 750 dollars income. The reseller account uses less than half of the allocated resources most of the time. There is clearly plenty of headroom.

At that rate, if we keep 25 accounts on each reseller account, we make 630 per yer per 25 account. Call it 500. That’s 2,000 per year per 100 customers.