Why "Cheap" Can Cost You – Big Time
Filed Under (Anything) by admin on 02-07-2009
Oh, the allure of "cheap" web packages! Whether you are a start-up close or an accustomed business, it can be appetizing to acquirement a web website for a promised $499 or whatever the accepted action may be. After all, a web website is a web site, right? And for a brace hundred dollars, isn't it account it?
Before you acknowledgment those questions, you charge to actively consider:
What are you absolutely getting?
What will you in actuality be paying?
What ability you be sacrificing?
Let's yield those one at a time:
What you are absolutely getting?
This hits at the catechism of "a web website is a web site, right?" Attending at it this way: you are a different business. You accept a different artefact or service. You are aggravating to present yourself as outstanding in your industry. You wish -to-be barter to accept you aloft all the competition.
So let me ask you: if you are different and you wish to angle out, why would you accept a cookie-cutter web site?
Typically, "cheap packages" are "cheap" because they accept a set of connected templates. Hundreds if not bags of barter baddest from the aforementioned menu. That agency that you are traveling to attending just like a lot of added companies! And if they action connected archetype as well, you may not alone attending like your antagonism – you may be application the exact aforementioned words as they are! Where's the uniqueness? Where's the differentiator?
And if you anticipate it doesn't happen, I can assure you that it does. I afresh got a alarm from a bounded chiropractic office. Why? Because they had acclimated a arrangement web account to put up their web website … and so had their bounded competitor! Two chiropractic offices, in actuality a few afar apart, had the aforementioned clear architecture and canned archetype for their web sites. Now that's a problem!
What will you in actuality be paying?
Sure, $499 sounds good. But about that is not all you will end up paying. The $499 may be a abject bulk … and just like the airlines nowadays, annihilation you wish may be added on as an extra. Before you apperceive it, the bulk has angled or tripled, and you still accept annihilation added than a canned web website for your trouble.
Another add-on is hosting. Oftentimes you are appropriate to go with the company's hosting account in adjustment to get their appropriate deal. But their hosting may be $49.99 a ages – compared to $12.99 a ages for a commensurable hosting amalgamation elsewhere. What are you accepting for all that added money anniversary month? Answer: apparently nothing.
And how about maintenance? Maybe it is $499 to set up … but again every time you add new agreeable (which is capital to your web site's success), you are gouged on price. They accomplish up for that "cheap" bulk on the front-end by afraid it to you on the back-end.
So al of a sudden in 18 months or so, you deathwatch up to apprehend that this "cheap" website is just not apery your aggregation the way you want, and you absolutely charge an absolute website re-design. You sit down and add up all the invoices to date, and you are staggered to acquisition that "cheap" absolutely bulk you $7000 over 18 months. In fact, it bulk you the aforementioned bulk that it would accept bulk to accept had a custom website advised and launched in the aboriginal place. But now, that money is down the drain, so you're traveling to end up paying alert for what you absolutely capital from the beginning.
What ability you be sacrificing?
Another crisis area of "cheap" bales is that you may acquisition that you accept been sucked into a actual alarming position: You may end up paying licensing fees that you never bargained for. You may acquisition out that you don't own your own area name. Or your data. Or your content. You may acquisition out that you don't accept admission and authoritative rights to your own site. Then, if you wish to change web hosts or account providers, you are stuck.
Then, of course, there's the affair of support. One way that "cheap" bales survive is by alms little or no chump or abstruse support. Sure, they accept a buzz band you can alarm … but will you get a being on the band (and will they apperceive what they're talking about)? Sure, you can forward an email appeal … but will anyone respond? Basically, their business is to agitate out canned sites. Once your website is live, you generally about-face from a chump into a nuisance.
This is your company: your business, your livelihood, your future. Do you absolutely anticipate "cheap" is the way to go? Is it account it, for the account of accepting a "good deal," to accident paying through the adenoids on the back-end? To get a website that looks like anybody else's? To anguish about how safe the approaching of your website may be?
The old sayings are all too accurate if it comes to "cheap":
There ain't no such affair as a chargeless lunch.
If it sounds too acceptable to be true, it apparently is.
You get what you pay for.
What are you paying for?�




