oh my god, I am about to be royally ripped off....
Just had an email from the people that built my website last year and they are asking for £354 to host my site for a year, which includes SSL , support and a really crappy email account that only stores 20 emails before its full.
I am am sure last year when I asked them to build me a website they said after the first year the hosting would be £10 a month. nothing in writing about that of course.
So can anyone recommend someone who offers SSL (whatever that is) support and a good email account?
in a thread some years back on here it came out as one of the site favourites (same reason that I've adopted VT, Vonage and 12Pay). Just did a quick search and couln't find the one that I remember.
I get SiteMaker software in order to design and tinker with the site, a website name, I believe an unlimited number of web pages (if there is a restriction I've not found it), Support (which is actually pretty good) and I think that it's 5 email addresses that I have.
It's £54.99 a year (£65.99 per year VAT inclusive)
Also I get my site images from Freedigitalphotos.net which are free to use the smallest size versions of the images provided that you give acreditation on your site to them.
Of course, this approach means that one builds the website themselves rather than gets someone else to do it.
That said, I've seen some really, really poor "professional" sites. Not saying that mine is great but at least I didn't pay anyone a lot of money to create it and I can change it whenever and however I want. If I accepted payments via the site I would be more prone to seeking out a real professional (rather than the million and one web developers out there who set up in business but in many cases seem to know less about this than I do).
HTH,
Shaun.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
I am happy with my website content , I just want someone else to host it and hopefully transfer it over for me as I'm not very techy. Will Namesco do this and do they offer support?
The email address I have at the moment is so **** poor you can't even attach a PDF copy of a tax return to it!
I'm no expert Georgie so you need to talk to Namesco and maybe HostPapa directly.
One concern would be with the contract that you have with the person that developed your website in that did you buy the site content or are you effectively renting it. Thats may not be as clear cut as it sounds. i.e. just because you paid someone to develop a site on your behalf does not neccessarily imply that you have ownership. There may also be exit charges in the contract. (With Namesco it's a years fee's which at £65 isn't so bad).
As I say, talk to the guys at somewhere like one of the hosts suggested and see what they have to say.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
No I am sure I own the site...as for an exit fee I don't recall seeing that , but it wouldn't surprise me and now you've got me worried as maybe they can rip off me off with an exit fee..
Do you have a contract Georgie? Or did you agree to some hard to find T&Cs when setting it up? Best place to start. If not they cant sting you for exit fees. My Dad set up a website for me for another business a few years ago, and I recall him saying about ownership and absolutely make sure that you have access to be able to make amendments yourself, as thats where these folk make lots of cash sometimes, besides why should you need to approach someone if you want to tweak a phone number or add a bit of content. Hope you get it sorted - if you talk to the ones suggested they make even know any easy way of transferring the site. Ive done it before but it was a looooonnnng time ago and I cannot even recall who I was with now. One of these days I might get a new one for this business. let us know how you get on!
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Joanne
Winner of Bookkeeper of the Year 2015, 2016 & 2017
Thoughts are my own/not to be regarded as official advice,which should be sought from a suitably qualified Accountant.
You should check out answers with reference to the legal position
Another quick log-in because I'm still rushed - having noticed this thread in my RSS feed...
Going back to something in the original post: SSL stands for 'secure sockets layer' and for your website it basically means the difference between visiting it as www.example.com and as www.example.com - the latter basically means the data sent between a visitor's computer and the website (in either direction) is encrypted.
[Edit: the two urls have been turned into links by the forum software - the difference is the first is http:// etc... and the second is https:// etc...]
Whether you need this or not is subject to a number of things.
If you have any kind of log-in on the website for customers, you really should be serving the site as https, so if you change hosting you definitely need it.
As well as that, though, depending on how it's all set up you might be using it for email, and you might also be using it to update the site itself (if you do so, and depending on *how* you do so - though it sounds like you don't and the hosting/design company do).
Another possible benefit to SSL is everybody's favourite topic: SEO (or your "google ranking" if you like); Google now scores a site served via https higher than one served via http.
Putting the SSL issue to one side now, whether £354 is expensive depends on the nature and size of your site, and the quality of the hosting - but your reaction to their prices (as deduced from your very first line) suggests that, perhaps, you aren't quite the size of Amazon just yet (for whom £354/year would be a bargain!)
For example, one of my clients currently pays their hosting company (who designed their website) £240 plus VAT per year (paid monthly at £20 + VAT) - and that doesn't include email. Well, it does, sort of, but it's too limited so they don't use it; I used to host their website and email for something like £50 per year. The new design company - for perfectly reasonable grounds which I won't go into - insisted that they had to host the new website. However, the email options were crap - too few mailboxes, with any more costing £5 per mailbox per month. So I carried on hosting their email at £5 per mailbox per year; a shade cheaper! Offhand, I can't remember how many mailboxes that is, but 8 probably isn't far off (plus a few forwards which I don't charge for) - so they're paying something like £280 plus VAT per year in total.
Their email options were probably better than yours sound like, though. Quite frankly, what you describe is shockingly limited.
I'm intrigued at the increase from the proposed £10/month to £354/year, though. Do you have any record of that original amount being stated - emails, or whatever? Have you raised the point with them and had any kind of explanation as to why the new price is so much higher? (I wonder if they're just reselling someone else's hosting, and they've been on the receiving end of a sharp increase - there's been a case of this recently with an online backup provider).
FWIW, I use '1&1' - in some ways they are annoying (they ring every once in a while to try and sell you more services) but I generally do find them reliable. And their basic package *includes* an SSL certificate so your website can be served as https (though it's only one per package, not per domain name). I think the basic package is about a fiver per month and includes a free .uk domain name. You can register more domains, but they're not free. You can set up any number of mailboxes (and/or forwards) on any of your domain names - and the basic mailbox is 2GB in size (there's an option to use an MS Exchange-like package which gives you 5GB, but that's about a fiver per such mailbox per month).
The downside is transferring from your current people - it's down to you and them. But that's going to be the same no matter where you move to.
It might be worth looking at your website to get a feel for how complicated (or not) it is, try to establish if it's static pages or served from a CMS, and so on - and possibly to work out what the situation is with your hosts.
For example, if it turns out your site is static HTML pages, and there are no major copyright issues, it might be possible for me to use a tool called 'wget' to grab the whole site, zip it up and send it to you; you might then be able to simply upload the result to a new hosting company once you've transferred the domain to them.
At the other end of the scale, it could be like the example client of mine; a custom designed content management system; wget would only get the result of what the system serves, but not the underlying code (which would definitely be subject to copyright anyway).
I've temporarily enabled PMs on my account - if you don't want to make your URL generally known, you can send it directly to me and I'll take a look. I should stress that the ideal situation - that it's static html that I can easily nab - is probably not the case, but it's worth looking.
As for the possibility of an exit fee, if it's a .uk domain and it's registered in your name (not theirs) you can transfer that away from them easily through Nominet (assuming it's still possible); this used to cost about a tenner IIRC. That's just the domain, though, and doesn't address the site content.
-- Edited by VinceH on Monday 20th of June 2016 08:20:14 PM
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Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software
(I only came here looking for fellow apiarists...)
Oh I am so angry .... I've just tried to log in to my site and the link has been disabled..
Sounds like I used someone like your client Vince , it was a bespoke service and once the site was built it was handed over to me (I own it) . I was also given a log in so I could make as many changes as I wanted. Now it seems I can't even do that.
I was quoted £10 a month over the phone when I was asking how much their hosting was. I didn't think to ask them to put it in writing. I have spoken to someone this afternoon at this web design company and they said they have no record email or otherwise of a hosting charge of £10 a month.
So I am stuffed basically...think I'll go whittle spoons in the woods.....
So it's definitely using a CMS, then - otherwise your ability to make changes would require more understanding of how it all works than (I get the impression) you have.
Shame. If it was static, it might still have been possible to nab a copy - there's always a chance it's archived on the Internet Archive's 'Wayback Machine' at http://archive.org/web/ (provided the hosts didn't block archiving)
With the same non-blocking caveat, there might be some sign of your site there anyway - but if it's a CMS, as I said before, we're talking served content but not the underlying code that produces it.
(It might still be worth a look; even if we can grab your basic text, it'll make it a little easier for someone else to build you a new site - you've already done (or had done) the copywriting once, why do it again?)
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Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software
(I only came here looking for fellow apiarists...)
