I've been working on pricing our new services and want an honest answer to the issue actual serve usage as apposed to quoted plans.

Say i wanted to sell plans in line with some of the leading budget hosts. Forgetting about any additional services. I decide to follow the crowd, and price up my plans as follows:

$7.95 = 5GB transfer + 250MB Storage.

My question is how much of the storage and bandwidth on average will get used by my clients? As if they used their full allocation my business would be a loss leader from the start.

I'm working on a plan which allows for an initial budget of around $500 per box, with 150 accounts max per box. At 7.95 x 150 = $1,192 revenue per box leaving me with a gross profit of $692, out of which will come all my support and marketing costs.

Does this sound realistic to you guys, or am i overcrowding my servers and underestimating my customers actual resource usage?

Netguy - on average our users use less than 1/2 of the space alloted on their account and about 1/3 the bandwith.

That's about right. I would expect the transfer to be about 25% of normal 50% if high traffic site. Profit per box is about standard what people reveal and 150 sites isn't overcrowding unless you have a very slow server.

Thanks guys. Thats a big help. I thought i was pretty much on track. So you think the margin I forecast is realistic?