ARTICLES - FREE WEBSITES AND HOSTING
The High Cost of Freebies
A few Interesting Case Studies
Joe was a small businessman who wanted to use his website to give himself a serious web presence. He went with a company who offered a really low web development fee (R400), along with a free domain name and free search engine submission.
He'd done a bit of research and knew that this was a good deal. A month later Joe received his account. His hosting was well over R400 a month. When he complained that this was much higher than he'd expected and said that he was going to change host, his contract was produced. The same one that had seemed too mind-boggling to read and that he had been told was simply a standard contract. Without realising it, he had tied himself in to a 2 year hosting contract at R430 per month.
His 4 page website was also an awful cut and paste number that made his competitors look wonderful.
To do a basic comparison. A unique, professional 4 page website should not have cost him more than R1400. His hosting should have cost him no more than R95 a month. Calculated over the 2 years, the R1000 that Joe saved up-front amounted to an actual loss of over R7000. To add insult to injury, his site never brought a single sale - in fact, it only had 3 visitors in the first 5 months because although it had been submitted to a vast number of (irrelevant) search engines, the site was not search engine friendly nor properly optimised.
Case study 2:
Clerise had landed on the other end of the spectrum. She paid a whopping R7000 for a website that should have cost no more than R1800. Although it had some fancy looking links and other gizmos, it was totally unoptimised, again had less than a dozen visitors (in 13 months) and the content was so badly presented that it gave visitors no reason to actually deal with her. She also paid R700 for her domain name to be registered. Hosting was R120 per month.
On numerous occassions when Clerise went to visit her site, she got nothing but a 404 error (page not found). On one occasion when her site had been down for over an hour, she wanted to call and complain, but the hosting company had no after-hours contact.
When her site was still down two hours later, she sent an email. By 11am the next morning, she had received no response and her site was still not available.
Clerise snapped. Her site had now been down for a total of 17 hours. She phoned, complained bitterly and was told to read her contract.
According to what she had agreed to, Clerise had no recourse until her site was down for more than 24 hours. Only then would she be entitled to even complain. To put this in perspective, - 10 minutes is a long downtime. 25 Hours can be the kiss of death. On their website, this company offered a 99.5% uptime! - but their terms and conditions specifically stated that they guaranteed nothing.
Case Study 3:
Mark wanted a business website, shopped around a bit and finally settled with a company that had a great advertising splurb and a really charming salesman. They also offered a free domain name and 6 months free hosting. He duly paid R4500 for his R1400 worth of website and, not too sure how it all worked, allowed the nice "account manager" (aka salesman) to guide him. He purchased a cheap hosting package (R20 a month - an amazing deal), paid the R150 set-up fee, and was all set to go.
Mark's site appeared on the internet for a total of 5 days. The company, which had only been in business for 7 months, suddenly went belly-up and nobody had bothered to tell him or any of their other clients. Once he discovered this, he frantically scrambled to try to locate someone from the company so that he could get his website from them. None of the contact details worked. The phones were never answered and emails simply bounced back.
He had a major marketing drive ready to launch - newspaper ads accross the country, all relying heavily on his website as part of the selling process. - This was in fact the only contact info that the ads provided. The site had to get back up within a week. The only alternative was to quickly get another site developed and move to a new host. Apart from costing more money, the website was the easy part, but when it came to getting it hosted, they discovered the next crucial snag.
The hosting company had registered his domain name to themselves and Mark had absolutely no way of proving that it was his. He lost his website, lost his online trading name, had to start from scratch and lost all the money (tens of thousands of rands) that he had spent on his marketing campaign. It is impossible to calculate how much he lost in revenue due to people reading his offline adverts and landing up at a dead website.
THE BLUFF
The above case studies are not even the tip of the tip of the iceberg. The internet is filled with horror stories of expensive experiences and so many of them relate to freebies, cheap offers and great deals.
The worst part of it is that in most cases there is absolutely no recourse, or, if there is, it is way too expensive to pursue.
I hope that this article has emphasised the need to protect yourself and do business wisely on the internet.
Ask the questions. Read the entire contract / terms and conditions. Know what you are getting into and keep yourself covered.
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