I've been thinking about hiring a company to rework my site for the end result of increased traffic and sales. I had a meeting with a local company and just received a proposal. There are some things that I wanted an unbiased opinion on. 1.They have a linking program where basically they will put a link of my site on all their existing clients sites that have a good PR. The thing I am skeptical about is none of the sites are relative to my content. I thought google liked backword links that are relevant? The other thing is this cost $500 annually. I don't know how many links are included. This is something I intend to find out, but I can't imagine it's more than 10-20. 2.Here is the biggest red flag that I, as a website owner, saw. I currently have an ecommerce site that was custom built. The company that built it recently went out of business, so I was stuck transfering the site to a new host and website development company. The whole situation wasn't fun. In light of my past experience, this company I just got the proposal from wants to redo my site using their e-commerce software. (this is the software that is used to upload products, descriptions, prices, etc) I'm fine with that, but this software is considered a lease and "cannot be transfered to another service provider." So in my eyes, if I want to leave this company for some unknown reason, I am basically left with a website that I cannot maintain. This is not how it worked with my past company, so this feels strange. 3.The cost for monthly hosting and the cost for the above "lease" of the ecommerce software is $70 a month. This is for the basic 250 products, 50MB of disk space, 2 GB of monthly bandwidth, and 5 email accounts. Am I off-base here in saying this is outrageous? 4.How much does an SSL certificate cost per year? 5.Obviously websites need to be maintained to continually rank high. This company wants $1400 every 3 months. Being a small 2 person company, I'm not sure if I can swing this. If my sales increase enough through the work of this company to pay for this, then I have no problem paying it, but i'm wondering how long I will have to pay $1400 without increased sales? 6.Last thing. No FTP access. Again, with the last company I had FTP access. I don't like the idea of not having FTP access to my own site. Is this common? Well, thats it. Let here some comments!
Ok first flag, 2gb of bandwidth. Definitely Not enough. Get a dreamhost account. 2 Terabites for like $29 with a coupon for a year! (Pm me i'll get it to you) Now to the rest 1. Screw the linking program and just buy text link ads if you are going to do this you may spend more, but hell at least it is relevant. 2. There are definitely some open source e commerce stuff out there. Look into it i bet if you could find someone reliable on here to install it for you, or heck i bet you could do it. 3. the hosting is definitely not enough to suit your needs. 2 GB goes in like 2 days for a small site, unless your displaying only text. 4. SSL Certificates start at around $90. But Godaddy was just approved to issue them, they have them for $9.99 and $14.99. May want to read the specifics about it. 5. SEO can take a while to take affect so if you do go with this company you may be paying 6mo before you see any increase, it may be quicker however. 6. Big red flag, this probably means they are hosting it out of their living room or have one server. This defiantly wouldn't fly with me. I've never heard of this. Furthermore, most people wont reply to a huge amount of text, lol thats my findings, they see this big blob and hit the back button without reading it.
If you need a more reliable host, http://www.hostmonster.com is pretty good, they also have great customer service. Watch out for the call 5 minutes after you sign up with them lol. Ive had a great experience there. Much more reliable than Dreamhost. To check out dreamhost's status and past problems check out www.dreamhoststatus.com. You will see they have many disappointed members.