Pleth & Pricing
Friday, July 11th, 2008
I was recently asked by one of our partner graphic design firms to write a note to a potential client explaining the rationale for Pleth, LLC’s pricing on it’s domains. As you may or may not know it is $29.95 annually and has been at that level since we opened our doors.
I thought I would share the bulk of the note since I think it may help demonstrate Pleth, LLC’s approach to managed web hosting.
First of all we never try to hide the fact that many of our price points are higher than what you can get through services like *******.
The primary reasons for the pricing differences are related to the services we associate with our domains/hosting. First of all we consider ourselves the caretaker of your domain, we monitor all our domains for renewal status. We have had customers that have unintentionally allowed their domains to lapse and their site/email stops working. It is also possible that, in that scenario, they permanently lose their domain — even to a competitor. Pleth won’t let this happen.
Many companies also don’t tightly control who registers their domain, often times the legal domain owner appears to be an employee who registered the domain on the company’s behalf and often that employee is gone as issues of ownership/domain control arise.
Another big issue is DNS management. At Pleth we manage the DNS for all the domains in our registrar account. This relates to all the settings for the domain and email to work. Without our services this is left up to the customer who rarely has the knowledge of the DNS system to manage this for themselves.
Another wrinkle with the DNS management is based on the fact that we maintain virtualized servers. We do this in order to leave ourselves nimble in case of technical difficulties. It is not unusual for us to move around domains/servers on our side in order to route around outage issues. If the DNS is not within our service and therefore not within our control it is possible that customer uptime could be affected as we perform all the technical tasks on our side that are necessary to keep things running smoothly. We have 4 people that directly manage this on our side, full-time, and not having control of the DNS can negate a lot of the work that we do day in and day out.
So, if you boil it all down, with “warehouse” pricing in a system like *******’s you are essentially on your own. With Pleth, you should never feel like you are alone. In fact, most of our customers never realize any of our management activities are going on at all.
