Am I Paying to Much?

[WDA]

I believe I may be paying too much for our services. Our plan covers our hosting, 2 hours of maintenance (maybe 3), providing statistical info, PPC (which I have only seen them add keywords on three different occations) and all of this for $250 a month. We have not left because of the unknown, we use Product Cart as our shopping cart and need someone knowledgable with it to take care of our maintenance and I am not sure where to go. Any suggestions? Am I better off taking my business somewhere else having it hosted for a lot less and spend that money on SEO? Which we need. Can any one suggest a place to have our site hosted? I greatly appreciate everyones feedback on this issue.

www.compressionstore.com

[roban]

Is this a dedicated server or shared? If you are on a dedicated server you can probably do better but not by much. [Edit: I see you are hosted by GoDaddy. So it is a shared solution and very expensive for this.] 2 hours of maintenance per month may be all you need. Do you have an SEO contract as well or is this all a part of one service including hosting? I see you don't have any description or key word meta tags.

[WDA]

We do not have a contract and our hosting is not through Go Daddy. They use someone to host our site, not sure who. They do not do any type of SEO for our site and they said that they do not do that. Any ideas?

[Corey Bryant]

If that is a dedicated server that is being maintained all the time and if there are any outages, they take care of it, etc - that's a good price. Can you find it cheaper - yes.

But are you happy with them? Is the uptime good? If you are happy and the uptime is great, why rock the boat?

[WDA]

I guess hosting is not the real issue. I originally was paying $99/month and that got me I believe the 2 hrs of maintenance and the hosting. I switched to another program for them to handle our PPC and am paying the $250/month. This is where my concern truly lies. In the 8 months since I switched to this, I believe they have worked on our PPC on three occasions. With the extra money I do get another hour of time per month. I just get the feeling that they work harder at trying to get your business than trying to keep it. The main person I work with over there is great and I am concerned that if I did leave that I would not have some one as knowledgable, in regards to our Shopping Cart and asp which is how our site was built. So I go back to this... am I better off going to the $99 a month and move my money to some one who can do SEO (they do not do SEO)? Sorry so wordy!

[Corey Bryant]

If you don't think you are getting your money's worth, ask them. It seems that your ROI is not what you would like?

Chances are, it might be better to go to a company that only specializes in PPC. Getting everything from one company can be good at times, but being so diversified in providing so many different services can be difficult to accomplish.

[roban]

PPC is NOT SEO. As Corey has rightly suggested ROI is your benchmark. Are you getting the sales to cover your expenses? Also it appears as though you are answering your own question. If they are not working for you then you are getting hosed. An open ended campaign is not a good idea, especially if you are not getting reports that substantiate the amount of money you are spending. I do a 6 month campaign that bills at a little less than you are paying and is reported on a monthly basis so you know what work is being done. If you are not getting the feedback that justifies your expenses, maybe it's time to look elsewhere.

[bgratt]

I had similar problem few weeks back and found a great solution which I would recommend for any small business owner. Just try http://gowebplans.com, they have a good solution for very reasonable price. I signed up recently and they are currently working on mine. My monthly cost is $40 which is very attractive for small businesses & especially startups.

When I inquired they said they will be introducing more options such as SEO/PPC shortly.

[SeattleCPA]

Boy, $250 a month seems expensive to me. Excluding PPC and doing the HTML editing myself, I think I spend probably less than $100 a year for simple sites like those shown in my sig... You must be doing a lot of database at your site or something?

Steve, Seattle CPA, author QuickBooks for Dummies
Publisher of do it yourself kits for limited liability company, s corporation, and incorporation setups