We like to keep an eye on the hosting competition here in Prague, so imagine our concern when we discovered a company offering free hosting on Sitepoint. The ad had been posted in July so we were curious as to how such an offer hadn’t come to our attention before. After all, we only offer free hosting for our Prague design clients, and even then that’s only if we’re doing a special offer promotion.
Of course we clicked the links provided in the ad, but none of them lead to any free hosting plans. Perhaps they too had made this offer as part of some short-lived promotion? Undaunted, we clicked around the poorly designed site and eventually found it via a link to domain registration. There it was, an offer of 30Mb disk storage with 500Mb of monthly bandwidth (misspelt as ‘bandwith’ on the site!).
Presumably the offer was a way of getting you to register a domain name with them, but with a .com listed as 7€ (which is £5.65 at today’s exchange rate - cheaper than our price of £6.99) we thought we’d give it a go. Sadly, or perhaps fortunately, the link to order this incredible offer didn’t work (surprise, surprise)!
Oh well, that’s £5.65 saved I guess, and a lesson learned. If an offer looks too good to be true, it probably is.
As the politicians argue about whether the country is heading for recession or not, Prague’s website designers are in no doubt. There’s a definite slump in the number of businesses who want new websites developed or their current ones revamped.
Only a couple of months ago, UKCZ Design could pick and choose the projects we accepted. We’re a small company with a good reputation for quality work delivered on time, and taking too much work would threaten that reputation. But not enough work could threaten the company, so it’s a fine balancing act which in the past we’ve not had any trouble achieving.
With the latest design project nearing completion, it was time once again to remind the English-speaking community in Prague about our services. So we placed an advert in the normal place, and waited for the phone to start ringing as it always had in the past. But we received only one enquiry.
Undaunted, we threw a page together offering a small business website designed for 5,000Kc , with free hosting for a year, and advertised that instead. We received a total of zero enquiries! Not one. Nobody in Prague wants a website designed and hosted for a year for less than £160 apparently.
Clearly the credit crunch and subsequent downturn is hitting even the normally better off Prague expat community. So when you hear politicians argue about whether we’re heading for a recession, remember this tale, and trust us when we tell you that we are.
