Help! Confused about website hosting

purpleducky

About a year ago I naively persuaded my father to get a website for his business to make it look more professional. We got a domain with GoDaddy.com and paid a designer to set up the website (simple 4-page site with 2 email addresses).

The web designer has now sent a bill for 'a year's web and email hosting' - £120. This seems a lot for a website with maybe two visits a month; should we try to shop around for a better deal or are we tied into hosting with this guy?

isofa

Depends what contract/agreement you signed, you'd not get 2 hours of my time for that fee Surely you got a quote and signed and agreed it?

Obviously if you can host and update it yourself, you can do it for far less, but if you don't know what you are doing and it's a professional site run by a professional designer, 120 is a bargain.

kwikbreaks

If it really is only getting 2 visits a month you may as well just bin it and put a card in the newsagent's window - that would get more than 2 reads a month and be cheaper.

isofa

Quite! Can you verify the amount of visits (not the same as hits), if you want to get more traffic you need to advertise it more - or just abandon the idea...

purpleducky

isofa wrote: »

Depends what contract/agreement you signed, you'd not get 2 hours of my time for that fee Surely you got a quote and signed and agreed it?

Obviously if you can host and update it yourself, you can do it for far less, but if you don't know what you are doing and it's a professional site run by a professional designer, 120 is a bargain.

We paid for the site design a year ago. It doesn't need updating, the content never changes so there are no further charges for design/maintenence. £120 is the charge purely for a year's hosting.

purpleducky

isofa wrote: »

Quite! Can you verify the amount of visits (not the same as hits), if you want to get more traffic you need to advertise it more - or just abandon the idea...

I'm not sure how we'd get info about the amount of visits - the web designer doesn't provide any data of this sort. It's useful to have an online presence for the business's image, I just think we may be being taken for a ride with the hosting :-(

weegie.geek

Hosting and domain registration for a site with that amount of traffic shouldn't be any more than £20 a year.

Depends if he registered the domain as HIS or as yours. Some of these guys will register it as yours then really drag their heels over transferring it to you.

If you want to PM me the domain name I'll take a look and see who he's registered it as, and where it's hosted etc.

thebaldwindowfitter

may i ask what this business of yours is that doesnt need regularly updating of the website. If its not getting found on google by new visitors which is what is needed then you will be getting 2 hits a month .i use www.hydrahosts.com and it cost £10 a year to host each of my sites

kwikbreaks

purpleducky wrote: »

It's useful to have an online presence for the business's image, I just think we may be being taken for a ride with the hosting :-(

Lets put it this way - for £200 + VAT a year I get my own virtual server (the real server hosts 4 VS) which lets me host as many sites as I like. That is through a friend but isn't much cheaper than similar commercial offerings. Those sites aren't really high volume but visitor numbers are at the thousands a day level.

R0CKY

£120 for a years hosting is not unheard of - you can pay more, you can pay less. If you want to pay less all you have to do is select a new host, it's really not difficult, here are the steps.

1. Select a new host and purchase a hosting plan. Your new host will supply you with two nameservers (something like one.newhost.com and two.newhost.com)
2. Tell your webdesigner that you are moving the site and you want the domain name to point to the new nameservers.

That's it.

You'll still need to pay your old webdesigner an annual sum for the renewal of the domain though - probably between £5-£10.

HTH.

p.s. If I was your current host, I'd probably offer you a reduced price based on the very small resources your site is using. Also, for future reference, it's very easy to buy your own domain through godaddy.com, and avoid dealing with middlemen webdesigners just for a domain name.

HappyIdiotTalk

It sounds to me like your web designer built the site and is now hosting it for you.

Although the website is built/finished, you still need to pay for it to be hosted, and this is not free. Someone somewhere is paying the bill for the server its sitting on, and the connect to the internet that server is using. Its not therefore unreasonable for this fella (if he's hosting it) to ask for the rent money as it were.

That said, as others have pointed out, you could have the site moved to cheaper service.