Is paying $12 for 12 months for a website value for money?

We have been pondering this today and we have come to a consensus, if you take up this offer, you’ve blown $12!

Why are we saying this?

  1. First of all you don’t get your own domain name so to get indexed you will be promoting someone else’s business more than your own if it was to get indexed in Google and if you try to change over to your own domain name, there will be additional costs and transferring from one domain to another is just not easy.
  2. Next consider the numbers, 1000 websites @ $12, $12K for 12 months – consider it will take 2 staff to manage the hosting, the only way for this to pay for itself would be to have a web server with 50,000 websites on it. Taking that it to consideration, that server is going to be running at massive loads 24/7/365
  3. It is on a managed platform, ie you never own the code and if you business grows, you need to start again and move to a larger platform.
  4. The scope to grow is limited to the features on offer.

With Magento or WordPress the growth possibilities are endless and you own the code and are free to move it around as you wish. We always look at SEO and very rarely do managed platforms appear on the front page of Google, mainly due to the lack of optimisation that can be made to the code.

So all in all $12 sounds attractive but the cost of not having a professionally built website, marketed properly and generating a ROI long term will cost more.

Spend a little and it will be shown to be a wise decision and investment.