I get inquiries from people who have a business and have been talked into registering a domain name and obtaining web site hosting through their phone provider. Without naming names, you probably have a good idea which one I’m talking about here.
Now, providing an additional service to their customers is fine, but unless you have money to throw away it always pays to compare ‘apples with apples’.
Firstly, domain name registration is handled by accredited domain registry agencies – a fee, which usually covers 2 years, is paid to the agency and that means you are the registered owner of the domain name. Period. No additional domain maintenance fees are required (there is nothing to maintain afterall!) and charging an additional fee for this is hard to justify.
The actual 2 year fee should be in the $35 to $50 range for a .com.au or .net.au domain name, but there are many companies, not just telcos, that charge double this. The phone company I’m talking about even has the gall to charge a monthly ‘management’ fee on top! The fee is justified by them as ‘providing email services for the domain’ – you’d be hard-pressed to find any good hosting company that charge their customers extra for this very basic (and included) feature of hosting accounts.
Secondly, web site hosting fees do vary considerably. You should expect to pay between $15 – $25 per month for a reasonable amount of space on quality hosting on AUSTRALIAN-BASED hosting servers. You can pay considerably less by using US-based servers – I would strongly advise against doing this and I will discuss this in detail below. I have seen figures as high as $40-$70 per month from telcos and other providers for little more than basic hosting plans.
How can they charge this much? The brand name is ‘trusted’ and the ‘benefit’ of paying the hosting along with the phone bill is often mentioned as the reasoning to me. Ok sure, that’s fine and if that is important to you then I don’t have a problem with it – just so long as the hosting provided is standard web hosting with all the expected included features like SQL database support and CPanel or similar facility so the customer (or web designer) can easily add or change their hosting account features.
I’ve just completed a site that could not be built with CMS features for just this reason – the client’s hosting was with their telco and they don’t provide the facility of MySQL which is needed for CMS sites unless the client was prepared to change to an even more expensive plan and then pay for the ‘extra’ MySQL facility! They weren’t prepared to do this and I don’t blame them.
Be warned – as with any contract or deal you may be offered, read the fine print and ask around before agreeing to anything!
As I mentioned above, you can use US-based servers to host your website and the cost savings are certainly there. However – and this is not just my opinion, it is from my experiences with hosting companies over many years – you do get what you pay for. I have experienced all of these from offshore-based server companies – slow page loading times, websites completely unavailable (offline), website email accounts disappearing and poor technical support (if any – one company I used were only contactable by email and messages were simply ignored for weeks). I never regretted changing to good quality Australian-based servers and quite simply, will not provide offshore hosting for any of my customer’s websites.
