Some website hosting companies offer free or nearly free hosting packages, sometimes even including a free "build your own" website. How are they able to do this?

Quite simply, such companies usually have vast data centres, crammed full of websites... sometimes tens of thousands of websites on each machine. In order to keep the price so low they have very few staff, who may in fact be located on the other side of the world. Their websites are a great way of getting something on the web quickly, but there is often a limited choice of styles and very little help if you get into trouble. If you want something unique to your business, this is probably not the best way to go. More worryingly, all is usually well until something goes wrong, or you want something out of the ordinary. It can often take several days just to elicit a response from such suppliers.

Malvern Web Solutions use a UK-based supplier for hosting our websites, with 24/7 UK support. The response time to enquiries is measured in minutes. Although we sometimes use "off the shelf" templates to form the basis of our websites, they are all individually tailored to our customers' needs.

In the medium to long term, the high-volume, low-cost suppliers could actually end up costing you more.