Remember when we started in 2010? Our goal was to bring premium hosting services to the Czech Republic at prices that would be affordable for everyone. And we did it! In just 31 months we have climbed to the top among hosting services in the Czech Republic and since then we have been pulling further ahead. But in order keep providing the best service and evolving further, it’s time to take an important step. Inflation affects everyone. Costs are rising at a staggering pace. We want to maintain quality and constantly innovate, so we have to raise prices as well. It’s an investment in the future – in services that run your websites and that you can always rely on.
Why we need to increase prices
First of all, we would like to say that inflation has not ceased to surprise in recent years and has gradually affected all sectors. Inflation was 15.1% last year and will be around 8.5% this year. And that’s not counting the tens of percentages accumulated over the previous years since we started providing our services. All of this has had an impact on a lot of things. From our growth, by deploying new technologies and cost-saving measures, we are able to cover most of the increasing costs ourselves. But we can’t cover two components, and we can’t control them ourselves. Firstly, there is the cost of a quality team of people who maintain the services and push innovation. At the same time, we cannot cover the rising cost of electricity, which is really out of our control.
Not to mention that other costs are rising as well. For example, hardware is much more expensive.
Fortunately, we don’t have any loans or buy expensive licenses and software. We are completely free in this respect. We don’t even pay any rent, which would also become more expensive due to extreme inflation. We will be paying rent from January as we will be renting offices to further develop our business since we no longer have any space in the 2 buildings we own now.
Thanks to all this, we are consistently among the cheapest services on the market, yet we have a completely professional background and offer a quality, reliable and efficient service that we will now improve even further. Keep reading.
Quality people are priceless
For more than 13 years, we have been working together to create the story of our hosting service, which has the ambition and a decent chance to make its mark in the world with a great cyber protection and website acceleration service. And you know what? Most of our colleagues have been here since the beginning. We know each other, we trust each other and we work as one big team. Each of us is at the heart of what we do – come up with new ideas and solutions every day to make your website work, make your services better and more efficient, implement new features or deal with challenging problems.
We want our team of people to feel stable and secure, so that colleagues can focus on their work and not worry about whether they can support their families. We do everything we can to make sure that our colleagues have a clear head and enjoy their work.
Most of us have been here since the beginning, or have tried elsewhere for a while and returned. There is no substitute for a team like that and it shows. When needed, we deal with problems and challenges outside working hours. When it comes to dealing with a crisis situation, everyone joins in, even though they could be at home saying they’re off the clock.
There is no shortage of volunteers to take on new projects and challenges. Those who want to expand their knowledge. Then it’s no problem to try new things and push everything further. Without this, many revolutionary things would never have been created that you won’t find anywhere else in the Czech Republic.
Payroll costs are almost 18% of our costs, which is a lot, but if you want to attract and retain quality people to grow, you can’t do it any other way. Other companies have it this way too. We’re not feeding anyone useless. There are over 50 of us here and there are just 4 non-IT colleagues including the cleaning lady.
Expensive electricity
As for electricity, yes, it’s a struggle. We all know it and we will feel it next year. Prices are going up and our government is not helping, but rather making it harder for all of us. Thanks to the great idea to pass on the cost of RES, it will get even more expensive. We expect an increase in costs of CZK 3 million per year.
In the Czech Republic, we pay more for electricity in our own datacentres (and we have some of the most economical datacentres) than abroad, where we have WEDOS Global servers, and every datacentre abroad charges a sizeable margin for reselling electricity. It’s crazy, but it’s true. Sad story.
Paradoxically, abroad, where we already have most of the infrastructure of WEDOS Global (which will soon have more servers than in the Czech Republic), our costs are not growing so fast.
In order to continue to provide quality and reliable operations, we need to adapt to the new electricity prices. Trust us, it’s not a decision we make lightly, but it’s a step we need to take to continue to provide you with the service you’ve come to expect.
We strive to be economical and efficient.
Last year (2022), the increased electricity price cost us 8 million more than the previous year (2021). This is a relatively high cost for our company. In 2023, the price of electricity is still significantly higher than in previous years. The cost of electricity is set to rise again next year, so we have to react and this has to be reflected in prices. If our energy costs rise by tens of percent, there is nothing else to do.
Although our government claims that there will be no increase in electricity prices, believe that in our case there will be an increase of at least 32 to 35% (if we compare it with this year). We already have to react to that and unfortunately we have to pass some of that on to our customers.
What will be more expensive and by how much
So, where will these changes show? Only where we feel it the most – in services that consume a lot of electricity and require constant attention from our team.
These are web hosting services Mailhosting, LowCost, NoLimit and NoLimit Extra. It will also affect services with dedicated power – WMS, VPS, Cloud and dedicated servers.
Previously we had electricity costs, for some services, in units of crowns and it was a negligible part of the price. In the last 2 years, however, costs have gotten to the point where the cost of electricity for each of our services is already tens of crowns per month and it’s already a major item, so we have to respond.
| Service | Old price in CZK (without VAT / month) | New price in CZK (without VAT / month) |
|---|---|---|
| Web Hosting – LowCost | 43 | 53,51 |
| Webhosting – NoLimit | 68,8 | 83,33 |
| Web Hosting – Extra | 135,8 | 166,53 |
| Mailhosting | 25 | 33 |
| WMS | from 617 | 677 |
| VPS SSD | from 146 | 150 |
| VPS ON | from 89.85 | 99 |
| WEDOS Cloud | from 473.9 | 520 |
| Dedicated servers | from 1500 | unchanged |
| Additional service | Old price in CZK (without VAT / month) | New price in CZK (without VAT / month) |
|---|---|---|
| Web hosting – unlimited number of aliases | 55 | 110 |
| Web hosting – domain using third party DNS servers* | 0 | 1000 |
* Webhosting – a domain using foreign DNS servers. The web hosting service charges a fee for a domain that goes to our servers, but uses third-party DNS services instead of our WEDOS DNS servers. The reasons for this fee are not related to the current price increase, but a technical measure to protect against attacks and to ensure the availability of all our services. We will explain the details to affected customers.
What do you get?
We want you to know that every extra penny you pay goes directly into ensuring that these services remain fast, safe and reliable – just as you’ve come to expect from us, with 24/7, 365 days a year customer support.
Plus, we can promise a little something extra. As part of the long-term service development plan, the quality of customer service will go up. Based on feedback, we create new articles in the knowledge base, instructional videos and prepare webinars to take you, our customers, further. In 2024, a new ticketing system is planned to make the handling of requests more transparent and ensure that all requests are dealt with. You’ll see when someone from support has read it, responded to it, possibly passed it on to the next department to deal with, etc.
We have purchased a new set of servers that we will gradually deploy during 2024. They have new faster processors with 5 GHz, which is a huge jump from the current 3.7 GHz. Customers with content management systems (WordPress, Drupal, PrestaShop, etc.) will notice it. Of course, we’ll continue to put fast NVMe server SSDs everywhere. Quality doesn’t come cheap and we want to maintain it.
In the last price increase, we adjusted some service parameters to ensure that everyone has enough computing power. This has helped some customers considerably. However, we are now at a stage where further increases do not make sense. The vast majority of our customers use only a fraction of the computing power, and those with slow sites need something else to solve their problems. That something could be summarized as “intelligent web CDN caching”.
And that’s exactly what WEDOS Global Protection is all about. This service will be gradually deployed free of charge from January to every web hosting, website and WMS. This means your website will have the best possible protection and loading speed thanks to our CDN cache – and for an unlimited number of domains. Everything tailored to your website. You won’t have to set up or change anything at all. So even if you have unlimited aliases with 100 WordPress installations, you won’t pay an extra penny. We don’t have that kind of offer for anyone else.
This will be a slightly modified WEDOS Global Protection Start tariff, which will not come with some of the usual restrictions. This means that it will be suitable for customers who have over a hundred thousand accesses per day.
If you would like to manage the WEDOS Global Protection settings yourself, you will need to switch the domain to the classic Start, Advanced or Expert plan. If you have web hosting, WMS or WebSite, you will get a 50% discount. This is a discount of CZK 900 per year with Advanced and even CZK 12,000 without VAT with Expert.
You don’t have to use WEDOS Global Protection, but most customers who have deployed it have experienced a significant increase in website loading speed. Below is a graph of CDN cache deployments on 5,000 sites and a demonstration of how it affected their average speed.
CDN cache functionality is constantly improving. In 2024, we plan to take it even further and directly integrate some components of well-known content management systems, such as WordPress, and its popular templates and extensions. These components will be available in dozens of locations around the world, directly connected or directly from Internet providers. So when your site requests them, they’ll download to the visitor very quickly.
You can also look forward to the experimental HTTP/3 protocol, which is used by Google and other big players in the market because it significantly speeds up page loading, especially in locations with slow internet.
Currently there are 4 WEDOS Global DNS servers. the fastest in Europe and among the top 25 in the world. In 2024 we want to be Europe’s number one.
No Czech company competes with us in this respect, nor will it. Instead, they prefer to buy WEDOS Global from us for their customers.
Price fixing
We want to treat our customers fairly and we want to be helpful. We have decided that you can lock in all services at current prices for up to 10 years in advance.
Simply extend the services until the end of 2023 at the current prices. Instructions on how to do this can be found here.
Price fixing cannot be combined with a loyalty program.
Conclusion
We know that any price change can be challenging for you, our loyal customers. But we want to assure you that we’re not taking this step lightly. We have been on a journey of innovation and growth together for the past 13 years and we are looking forward to the next stage of our journey together and we don’t want to slow down.
We’re raising prices, but with that we promise that the increase will go hand in hand with better service that we’ll continue to push, faster performance and around-the-clock support – everything you’ve come to expect and expect from us.
Thank you for your trust and support. Your satisfaction and success are our goal and motivation. With you, our customers, we look forward to taking the next steps into a future of innovation and continuous improvement.
Thank you for being with us on this journey. Together, we move forward with the confidence that the best is yet to come.