Why choose us to host & design your website?
Companies like Wix.com & Squarespace offer cheaper & easy to access web hosting. But are there any drawbacks?
(It’s worth noting that we think these services are very good. The simple to use designers have turned something once complex into something more freely available. However, there are things to consider…)
Why are these services cheaper?
Our standard website hosting price package is £12 per month, so how can companies like Wix.com and Squarespace offer hosting packages for as little as £4 per month.
Well… we’ve all heard the expression “You get what you pay for” and this is no exception to the rule, however there’s still no point in paying for features that you won’t use, so just what are the limitations of platforms like this offering cheaper hosting? And how might they impact your website? Do you actually need anything better?
1. Advertising
Firstly, it’s worth noting that all of the cheapest packages from these services will likely include advertising on your website. You don’t have any control over the adverts shown, meaning it would actually be possible to have your competitors adverts being shown on your site!
For some, that may not matter or be important, however no one likes to see adverts, so this is an important consideration when deciding what kind of experience you want your customers to have when visiting your website.
…vs Our Standard Package
It’s simple… No advertising. You are in full control of the content shown to your customers.
2. No Email Hosting
Secondly, almost NONE of the personal or single user packages on these services come with an email address or email hosting. You’ll have to pay for these separately.
…vs Our Standard Package
You get up to 3 email accounts on your website domain included. You get up to 2GB of storage per account for free, and for an extra £5 per month you get up to 50GB of email storage.
3. Video Limitations
As standard, all of these cheaper platforms put a per month limit on the amount of time that videos can be played on your website. This can be as little as 30 minutes, or worse, none at all unless you pay more. This is bad news if you want to use the site to showcase a product, or store subscription based content.
…vs Our Standard Package
Absolutely no limits on the amount of video footage that can be played per month to your website users.
4. Bandwidth Limitations
Another limitation with the cheaper hosting packages is how much data/bandwidth can be downloaded by customers in a month. This includes loading the website and all it’s pages, pictures and videos. The basic packages start at around 500MB per month.
…vs Our Standard Package
Again… No limitation on bandwidth.
5. Website Storage
This refers to the total size of your website. The basic packages with companies like Wix & Squarespace tend to start at around 500MB. For most 1 or 2 page websites with a few images, this would be enough. However, any kind of image/portfolio based website, or especially videos will very quickly use this space.
…vs Our Standard Package
As standard you get 10GB of site storage included. (Enough to store a couple of Blu-ray movies if you wanted.) If you hit this limit, then you can have an extra 25GB for only another £10 per month.
6. Off-Site Website Backups
At the time of writing, it would appear that most of these plans do not include any kind of data backup solution. This means that if they suffer any kind of corruption or data loss, or if their systems were subject to a hack of any kind, your website is at risk of total loss, and you’d be starting from scratch.
…vs Our Standard Package
Dedicated backups, retained over 3 weeks (One per week) so that even in the unlikely event that our web hosting infrastructure suffers a corruption or loss of data (Which it hasn’t ever) and the data becomes un-recoverable, you’ll still have a copy of your website… Exaclty as it was – ready to be re-uploaded.
In conclusion…
Ultimately, a like-for-like web hosting service from a company like us is going to cost the same if not less than Wix.com & Squarespace.
The difference is obviously going to be the cost to design and program the website itself. A standard website, with a homepage, About Us, Contact Form, Services Offered, & Portfolio would usually cost around £495 at the time of writing.
By comparison, designing a website yourself would be free. However, it is worth noting that there are design limitations that exist when using visual designers like the ones offered by Wix or Squarespace. Lets say for example you want to move an object a few pixels to the left or right… A visual designer works by using layout templates, so you won’t have that kind of flexibility in most cases.
And finally, lets not forget that paying for a website to be designed means you can have whatever you want! The limit is literally your imagination, whereas visual designers limit you to the pre-programmed assets and options.
This may not be important to you, however it helps to explain why there appears at first to be a large price gap between these self design services, and dedicated hosting & design companies.
