To thousands of people all over the world, we go far beyond being a web host. We’re a community. A support system. The people who believe in you even on the days you struggle to believe in yourself. We’re proud to have the best customers and that together we’ve created a family that no sales page can describe.
Our north star has always been to be value-led, and our goal to offer more value than any other web host. This means WordPress developer-grade support as standard, exclusively commissioned stock photos every month, free malware cleaning from our professional in-house team, custom advice on plugins, security, site speed and many other things, an active multi-faceted community on Facebook and Slack, personal help with your website goals, free downloads and courses tailored to bloggers and digital businesses, and much more.
Since we launched, we’ve never increased our prices, but the world has changed a lot since 2017. In this post we explain why we’re increasing hosting plan prices for new customers only, domain name price changes, and how the money will be spent.
Just to reiterate: If you have purchased a hosting plan with us prior to September 2021, your pricing will remain the same and the new plan pricing won’t affect what you pay. Hosting plan price changes are for new customers only.
Why we’re increasing prices
As much as we don’t want to increase prices, there are several reasons to do it, including:
01. We’ve never increased prices before, so things like increased taxes, inflation, currency fluctuations and supplier price increases are all things we’ve taken a hit on over the past four years – we’ve absorbed the costs to protect your pricing.
02. Supplier and provider price increases – there have been a lot of these since Covid, either because of it or because companies were planning to put their prices up before it hit and decided to hold off for a while. Now, they’re raising prices thick and fast.
03. To better reflect our offering; we provide a premium managed service, and a lot of things we include for free are either extra costs with other hosts or just aren’t available (such as having a team of WordPress developers at your fingers to troubleshoot and fix WordPress-specific issues).
04. Improving our investments into the company in terms of staff, software and hardware, new technologies, upcoming products and services, and so on.
05. Since we launched, we’ve added a whole bunch of new things to our plans, including:
- More than doubling the web space and bandwidth for Tiny and Mighty plans.
- Increasing the number of sites that can be hosted on a Boss plan from 20 to 30.
- Deep malware scanning of all the websites we migrate to us, so you can be confident of good neighbors.
- Daily malware scanning.
- Free unlimited malware cleaning by our in-house developers (who also tell you the cause so you can stop it happening again in future; usually this involves removing/replacing a plugin).
- A global content delivery network (CDN) integrated as standard.
- Nodes in data centers all over the world to serve your content faster.
- Monthly residencies by paid experts over in our Facebook group.
- Over a hundred exclusive downloads added to our Resource Library.
- Free in-depth but easy to follow site speed course (other free courses coming soon!)
- Extended support hours and services (including WordPress support, not just hosting support, included as standard).
All these things have meant significant investments, and as we strive to make Lyrical Host better every day, we want to continue to invest and improve further over time to provide you with the best experience possible.
What we’re doing with the money
We believe in being transparent, so we’re more than happy to talk about where the money will go, and answer any questions you have.
Investing in people – We’re looking to double the size of our team over the next six months, for reasons that will become clear soon…we have some big announcements on the way! Staff are by far our biggest cost, because we’re extremely picky about who we hire and pay for skills and experience so we know they’re great at and definitely enjoy the work.
Bonuses for our support team – We pay our staff higher than market rate, but they’ve worked so hard throughout Covid and everything else that they deserve something extra.
Monthly donations – Every year we increase the number of girls we sponsor in Mozambique and we support new organizations too. Over the years we’ve also added a monthly donation to coral reefs and the UN/WHO Covid Fund (learn more about the Causes We Support with your help). Every month, we plant more trees to offset the carbon emissions from your website and help people around the world make a living from sustainable market gardens.
Inflation, tax & supplier price increases – Not exciting, but everything is getting more expensive. We’ve eaten the costs on a lot of things over time, but as much as we wish we could, we can’t do it indefinitely.
New products & services – Creating and investing in new products and services to ensure we meet (and hopefully surpass) your expectations is a big part of our focus. While many things we do take a lot of time and resources, we have endless ideas of how to save you time, money, and make your day-to-day easier, and this will see them come into fruition.
Money also goes to things like hiring contractors, freelancers, and VAs (from within our customer base wherever possible), giveaways and contests, sponsoring grassroots events for bloggers, and affiliate commission. We don’t have salespeople and we don’t run ads, which means that your earning potential as an affiliate is huge. You can learn more about our program here.
All price change details have been announced in our August 2021 email newsletter (sent 31st August or 1st Sept depending on your time zone). If you didn’t receive it or have any questions about anything covered in this post, please email sales@lyricalhost.com.
Thank you so much for your support!
diana
I love you, guys! Having my site hosted here is the best choice I’ve ever made.