One brochure site, five pages plus a blog they will update twice a year, about 1500 visits a month. The client pays for their own hosting and domain and will absolutely ring me in eighteen months if the renewal doubles. I maintain it on a small monthly retainer. I want a number I can put in front of them that will still be true in year three.
My actual stack for exactly this kind of site, annualised: a mid-tier host that does not oversell, the domain at a registrar that charges the same every year, email on a proper mail provider rather than the host, and an off-site backup that does not live in the same account as the site.
The email line is the one people leave out of the quote and it is the one that causes the most grief. Host-provided mailboxes on cheap shared plans are consistently the worst part of the package, deliverability is poor, and moving mail later while the site stays put is a much bigger job than moving the site.
Going to argue the unpopular one. For five pages and a blog updated twice a year, WordPress is a maintenance liability you have volunteered to own. It needs core updates, plugin updates, a security posture and a backup regime, forever, for a site that changes twice a year. A static site with a small hosted editor, or even a site builder the client can log into, costs less to run and cannot be compromised through a plugin.
If the client insists on WordPress because they have heard of it, that is a real reason and you should charge for it. But do not pretend it is the cheap option.
Half agree. The maintenance is real, but so is the moment in year three when the client wants something WordPress does out of the box and your static setup needs a rebuild. I price the maintenance in rather than avoiding the platform.
The trick that solved this for me was stopping the client from buying hosting at all. I quote a care plan that includes hosting, backups, updates and a fixed number of small changes, and I buy the hosting wholesale under my own account. One line item, one number, no renewal shock, and I control the environment which means I control how long a problem takes me to fix.
The cheap shared host renewal trap is real and it is the entire business model there: the introductory year is a customer acquisition cost and the renewal is the product. If your client buys direct, they will get the introductory price, forget, and then ring you angry about a number you did not choose.
The care plan approach also fixes the who is responsible when it breaks question, which is worth more than the margin. Ambiguity there is how you end up doing free work at 11pm.
This reframes the whole thing. The client does not want to buy hosting, they want the site to be up.
Whatever you decide about hosting, register the domain in the client's own account with the client's own card and their email as owner. You get delegated access. Never own a client's domain for them.
The thing managed WordPress hosting actually sells you is a good day when something breaks: a one click restore to yesterday, a staging copy to test a plugin update, and support who know the platform. On a brochure site that might be twice a year. If your retainer means their emergency is your evening, that convenience is worth paying for out of the retainer, and if the client is buying direct on price then it is not.
@migration_marek · 5mo ago
I did the cheap shared host version to keep a quote competitive and it cost me a weekend. Outdated plugin, injected spam pages, host suspended the account, client's email went down with the site because it was all in one place, and I did the cleanup for free because I had chosen the host. The hosting saving over two years was less than the value of that weekend.
Reply
Report