I started working with a WordPress theme in 2011 for my photography and immediately got requests to make websites for friends and family when everyone found out I could “build a website”, which then turned into a side hustle opportunity all within 1 year.
…after 5 years if insanity, from switching between WordPress to wix, then back, then settling on HTML templates, then going back to WordPress and dealing with Karen’s … I made the choice to start a reseller hosting account *Using WHMCS in 2016 to manage all my clients and begin making residual income.
Now my philosophy is that my “hosting” (which is just reselling) is actually private, in other words, I hand select every client, and I don’t publically offer or accept random users or accounts.
This allows me to have full quality control of my cluster knowing randoms aren’t ruining things. Additionally, I’m backed by one if the few awesome companies that aren’t sold out to EIG, so even on shared hosting, there are less than 10k of provisioned customers, unlike the millions of customers that are over provisioned on traditional hosts.
Those two things combined, along side me personally designing every clients site ensuring full optimization and quality control over plugins, having light speed cache, and cloudflair, allows me to offer essentially the best possible speed and reliability among traditional hosts. I’ve never had any substantial outages, and I’ve never had a clients site go down, infact, my biggest client (a town newspaper in GA) receives roughly 120,000 - 300,000 hits a month uploading 2-3 articles a day using divi extra, and not a single hiccup in 2 years.
Yet, I still arrive to be even better, and this is where I turn to webflow.
Unfortunately, the model I’ve adopted which has worked extreamly well for me (because I’m in charge of site design) is simple: 9.99/mo for basic site, 19.99/mo for commerce or forums or essentially anything requiring more database tables, automation or user interaction.
A year ago I saw the superio potential of webflow, but unfortunately it’s been impossible for me to graft webflow into my Buisness, the price cuts into my bottom line and beyond, and I can’t remodel or justify the cost for some of my client base, so what gives???
As shitty as this sounds, I find my self still needing to rely (sadly) on WordPress as I can adapt and pivot with what curve balls clients request if me and save time (plugins), but to my knowledge, there are substantially less available integrations with webflow, and deciding to take the leap on webflow with a client is simply a loose loose for me,
- I will no longer make hosting income because I simply can’t markup their price, it’s fair as is but not for me reselling trying to make income off my hosted clients.
- Lack of webflow platofrm knowledge on my part.
This makes it really hard for me to integrate with webflow… Am I the only one that feels this way? Or should be reconsidering my expectations where 29.99 is the new “LOWEST” plan cause that’s what it will take for me to be profitable here…