There are a handful of hosts I recommend, mainly because of their price and the way they’re set up with everything you might need - I call them “full fat” hosts. However none of these hosts do regular backups, it’s left down to the user to do so. (Personally I was using a bit of desktop software to do this, but for some reason it’s stopped working.)

As many people don’t bother with backups, when that catastrophic failure happens, they lose everything they’ve worked on and it can then take a while for the site to get put back together again.

I wouldn’t think it unreasonable for a firm to charge $400 / year to another business if they offered something like daily backups.

But like I said above, it’s difficult for people without any point of reference or knowledge of hosting to know just what they’re getting when they hand over their cash.

It’s certainly a dilemma and the only answer is for people to get themselves educated, or find someone they can work with that they trust.

-Frank Haywood

My partner and I also started our own web design/development company (we’re currently based in Hawaii) and it truly does astound us show many different options are out there…. confusing for the typical businessperson either just starting out or trying to upgrade.

Nowadays we have been heavily encouraging our clients to use content management systems (our own as well as open source like Joomla, OS Commerce, even Wordpress) to keep their content maintained. I don’t see why anyone would want to be locked in to a long-term hourly-type contract with a web designer when they may just do data entry or hire an admin assistant to do basic updates to page content or a calendar.

$400 for hosting is incredible and shows bad form on the part of the web design company.