I recently entered into some correspondence with one of my clients who emailed:

“My business partner has sent me a list of hosting sites at around £30 per annum and is keen to do this as cheaply as possible….”

This is considerably cheaper than the hosting we offer here at Branson Bond, so what’s the difference?

Well, as I explained to the client, in my opinion most web hosting these days is much of a muchness. Of course you’ll want to make sure that the host offers PHP & MySQL if you’re looking for a database driven site, which is pretty much what you’ll need if you’re looking to be able to update content yourself. (You could always go down the .asp route too but you’ll never find us recommending that!). You’ll also ideally be looking fora cPanel (control panel) that allows for quick installs / Fantastico etc.

And guess what? The budget web hosts will usually offer all that. So what’s the problem? Why not just go with them instead of us?

The problems arise when you need any kind of support. In my capacity as a web designer since the 1990′s, I’ve dealt, on behalf of clients, with most of the big internet companies and essentially had nightmares with almost all of them – hours spent on the phone watching the bills rise due to peak rate numbers, pressing 1 for this, 2 for that, valuable portions of my life spent on hold, then talking to an underpaid teenager with a crib sheet who really doesn’t know what they’re doing. It’s at that point that your budget hosting becomes a false economy. It’s also why we don’t host our new sites in the UK (never mind Brighton!) anymore.

At Branson Bond, if you have any kind of hosting issue, you get to talk to me – my personal attention, on a normal phone number. I can do this incidentally, because we have so few hosting issues.

Similarly with domain names, there is one budget domain company in the UK – familiar to all web designers I’m sure – that offers names really cheap and give what looks like a great deal until you want to move the domain, at which point if your time is worth anything at all, then you’ll stat metaphorically paying through the nose.

Of course, you may go with budget hosting / domains and never need support and never have any problems – that’s the gamble. The question is do you really want to gamble with your business for the sake of what you’re saving? I would say ‘good luck’ but you really shouldn’t be leaving it to luck!