The single most expensive part of any web project is the labor. Many companies think they can reduce costs by hiring an in-house webmaster or by shifting an employee to work on their site part time. Nothing could be further from the truth.

For the price of having an inexpensive employee working full or even part time on your web site, you can get three or four times the same amount of work done by a professional, and the quality of the work will be far superior. It's simple math.

But you say, "We need to be empowered to make decisions on the web site ourselves, in-house." Well, that's different. What you're really saying is that you want to have the power to work on the web site at a marketing and administrative level, not at a programming and production level. That sort of arrangement has value that cannot be so easily measured. Again, there is a simple and inexpensive solution. Use a web service.

A web service is a program that resides on your web site and that allows any novice to make changes to the web site from their own web browser. You simply login using your secure password, and then start typing and uploading pictures. There are, of course, limitations to a web service. But if you can define ahead of time what you want the web service to do, a good developer like Tom Ogden Design will create a service that minimizes the limitations and maximizes your expectations.

Domain registration is a perfect example of the fact that price is not always related to quality of service. With domain registrars it is almost irrelevant. Historically, Network Solutions, the largest and among the most expensive of registrars in the industry, has had by far the poorest service. While their telephone service was second to none, still you couldn't make changes to your domain record without jumping through a million hoops, some of which they charged a fee. It was a joke. eNom, GoDaddy, BulkRegister, for all their respective weaknesses, were far more effective in moving domain changes and transfers along, and their prices were at the bottom of the market.

By contrast, there is a limit to how low prices can go for hosting before service is compromised. Overhead for hosting, while not as low as it is for domain registration, is still fairly low. For this reason, many service providers and local ISP's have treated like their cash cow. Local ISP's tend to keep prices near the top of the scale because so many people are of the delusion that location matters on the Internet. Sometimes they think they'll get better service from local companies. The truth is, most of those companies are too strapped to get quality people. Some even rely on contract support companies hundreds of miles away. So much for local.

Small ISP's and larger companies on a tight budget have the problem that limited facilities severly compromise uptime and performance. That means they can't afford the number of servers it takes to maintain top condition equipment with backup servers and little or no downtime.

Backbone position is an issue even the largest host companies sometimes suffer from. This means the host company cannot obtain a strategic central position on the Internet. Geography actually can play a part here, because the servers need to be in a place where they are a close as possible to several Tier 1 providers. A Tier 1 provider is a company that gives access at the highest level on the Internet. While a number of host companies utilize Tier 1 providers, some are a distance from that provider and others rely too heavily on one or two providers that limit their access to a certain region. A server that has good backbone position performs better not only in it's own area, but in all other areas as well. For example, it is a fact that some servers in Hong Kong can give you better and faster service than servers located just across the street.