ad serverMost of the SMBs find web marketing a costly affair. This is due to the confusion over cost involved for owning a business website. It is the responsibility of the Web Hosting Industry to be clear with the real price and values of being online such as service, reliability and quality, for small business owners.

As per the survey reports released by 1&1 Internet, Inc..84% of SMBs pay huge amount for web hosting and 40% of the SMB owners are without a website. Among them, 53% have no idea about the prices of websites. 83% of the SMBs which are already online, report that they find presence of website very essential to their company. The average respondent a website believed that a business website would cost him $67 per month whereas, 91 % of those same respondents thought it would cost more than $10 per month.

On an average a SMB spends $45 per month for Web hosting. 84 percent of SMB owners said they spend over $10 per month. Cost has become such an issue that when choosing a Web host 64 percent agreed affordability is critical factor, actually outranking service by 33 percent and quality and reliability by 25 percent.

SMBs can lower the costs of Web hosting by creating and updating their own website. Easy, DIY website packages helpful for SMBs to create their own website. Today, 28 percent of SMB owners create their own website and 37 percent hire professional Web designers.

Once the initial website is created, future work can be completed in-house. 44 percent of SMB owners save money by updating the site themselves; only 22 percent employ an external professional. Updating requires not much of programming skills. Since a template driven website requires not much knowledge of professional programming skills, the data suggests that 15 percent of SMBs are paying for a service they could have easily done in-house.

By MND A01