Oct 2nd, 2002 - Hosting accounts that come with Mva Merchant can now be had for $9/mo from Superb.net or free for the first year from 1stEasy.com.
Is it a joke? Or a scam of some kind? Or are these companies trying to get your business by giving you a price that is so cheap that you may feel like you can't pass it up.
Superb Internet's offering is has the catch that you only get the $9.00 a month price if you pay by the year plus there is a $25.00 setup fee. But still that is a total buy in of $133.00 for a years hosting and a license to use Miva Merchant while you are hosted there.
See details on the Superb.net offering.
For 1stEasy.com the offering is different. There is more money that has to be paid up front. £225 to be precise. But what you are actually paying for is the normal cost of set-up and first year annual fees to a WorldPay payment gateway account. You have to sign-up through a special link, which we assume is so that 1stEasy.com gets credit for the sale, and then 1stEasy.com gives you the website, Miva Merchant software, their WorldPay payment module, and you pay them nothing for a year. Considering that if you went with the $133.00 for Superb.net, you are still going to have to pay a gateway a set-up fee, and monthly fees and that could easily cost you more than the us equivilent of £225, that makes the actual buy-in cheaper at 1stEasy.com. After the first year you have to start paying them their normal price of £19.99 a month. There are other restrictions including bandwidth charges if you exceed your limits.
See details on the 1stEasy.com offering.
Is it worth it?
In general we are not fond of discount hosting, especially when it involves eCommerce. As our clients have come to learn, "You get what you pay for" is an important lesson when it comes to eCommerce. so while we wouldn't recommend that someone rely on such discounted accounts necessarily for their eCommerce, we do think there are some great uses for such accounts.
For web developers that don't have their own servers, these low cost accounts could be very valuable to use as test site, or development environments when working on new projects. They would allow you to show the client examples of what you can do, let them okay work as you go along, let them do testing with you, and would not break your budget.
For people new to eCommerce they are a great inexpensive way to get started to see if Miva Merchant is right for them. you can set-up a low cost site, learn the software, see what you can and can't do, and then when it comes time to get serious you can set-up a more costly and powerful site. But that doesn't mean you would necessarily toss the low cost account away. in fact you might want to keep it to continue to use as a place to try out new ideas, and test new modules or customizations so that you can incorporate them into your live site only after you are sure that is what you want.