A Web site on the cheap

You're preparing to build a Web page, for yourself or your business. The next thing you need is some memory space on a computer connected to the World Wide Web - a computer called a "server". And you figure the best place to get it is your Internet service provider (ISP), the company which connects you to the Net.

So you take the first step towards your Web page:. You ring your ISP, and ask how much you'll pay for space. And the bloke on the other end of the telephone tells you, "that'll be $1000 for a year's worth of space on the server, plus an extra charge for every 1000 hits on your page". With this single sentence, your Web dreams evaporate.

The good news is that it doesn't have to be this way. Yes, you can pay $1000 a year to put your "page" on the Web. But you can also pay $50 or less for the same space. You just have to know where to look. Lighthouse has surveyed around 20 Australian national ISPs to show you how much - or how little - you can pay.

More for your money

As Paul Zycinski of Internet Access points out, many people think of a web page as only a single A4 page, or even a single screenful of information. "They don't realise that a web 'page' can be many different documents", he says. When you buy five megabytes (5Mb) of server space, you buy enough not just for one "page" but for many pages, complete with text, graphics, sounds, links and e-mail feedback. As an example, this page takes up around 15 kilobytes; it will take 300 such pages to fill up the allotted server space.

Building a Web site carries other costs beside server space, of course. Apart from the cost of your hardware, there's the software cost, or at least the cost of downloading programs off the Internet. Most costly of all will be your time, especially if you sweat over your pages. But low-cost server space makes a Web site a much more attractive proposition.

Dial up a deal ...

Many of the best deals come from the ISPs who give you space on their server when you sign as a dial-up customer. OzEmail, for instance, offers 5 Mb of space, together with a "Home Page Creation Service" which makes a simple home page almost a foolproof exercise.

But OzEmail and some other respected ISPs charge close to $5 an hour for Internet access. Several other operators offer cheaper dial-up.

Lexicon offers you a huge 10 Mb if you hand over $100 - which also gets you two hours a week of Internet access. And Magna Data and Speed offer unlimited browsing time for monthly rates of $49 and $35 respectively. You may pay for this in other ways: Magna Data dial-up users, for instance, have recently been suffering severe line drop-out except at the quietest times of the day and night. But Magna Data, unusually, offers the 5 Mb deal to businesses as well as individuals.

... or just buy space

But if you already like your ISP and just want a cheap Web site, you can do even better. You'll get 6 Mb for a year for just $39 at Mira Networking (which hosts this Web site).

Even more startling is the price structure at Nemesis, where a paltry $10 joining fee gets you 3 Mb or more of server space for a year - not to mention Internet access at $1.20 an hour. And Suburbia may even host your site for free under certain conditions.

Why so cheap?

Quick visits to sites hosted by the low-cost site providers don't suggest they're obviously under-equipped; their sites load just as expected. Nor do they appear to be fly-by-night operators.

The fact is, the business of being an ISP is so new new that neither the companies nor their customers have quite figured it out yet. While your apples may vary by 50 per cent in price from shop to shop, Web space prices can vary by a startling 10,000 per cent.

Peter Saalmans, a director of consultancy Cutler & Company who specialises in the Internet, sees Web site space as an important new way for ISPs to give their customers extra value. But he also notes that dozens of ISPs have begun offering the service in the past few months, and that most of these businesses are run by computer experts, many lacking business skills. The result, he says, is that many ISPs don't really know how to price these services. "There's some very naive pricing out there, in both directions" he says.

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