There’s nothing quite nicer in the morning than a nice fresh coffee and croissant to start your day.
While you might be able to make your own coffee, gettting a drinkable capuccino requires skills and equipment that you simply won’t find at home – and I honestly can’t see many people preparing fresh croissants for breakfast every day.
So what do you do?
You grab a coffee and croissant in a cafe, bar, corner shop or garage.
Maybe you’ll take the few precious minutes to enjoy sipping it and waiting for that first cafeine hit to work its magic on your nervous system, or maybe you’ll end up grabbing breakfast “on the hoof”.
Would you honestly question the value of your coffee and croissant in the morning?
Would you start a big debate with someone over it?
Would you rudely berate the staff in a cafe serving you coffee every day?
Probably not.
Based on some totally unscientific research earlier today we worked out that the average price paid for a coffee in Dublin was about 3 euro. This being an average price for “a coffee” (You’d normally pay slightly more for a capuccino). It turns out that our “research” was quite accurate.
So if you add a croissant to your order the price will easily rise by another euro.
So your daily coffee and croissant could easily cost you 4 euro.
Why do I care?
Are Blacknight getting into the cafe business? While I may have worked in food and beverage in the past I don’t have any real interest in going back to it at the moment.
However our entry level hosting plan which I spoke about a few weeks ago is a mere 49.95 EUR ex-VAT for a year.
That’s just over 4 Euro a month, which is the price of a coffee plus croissant.
Even if you include VAT (sales tax) the total cost of a Minimus hosting plan for 1 year is just over 60 euro.
Add a domain into the mix (let’s say a .com at our normal rate), then you’re looking at an annual bill of less than 70 euro all in.
So I’m more than a little confused by that claim of us being overpriced
Why?
I’ll tell you why.
Have a look at what you can get with the Minimus hosting plan
If you have a minute or two to spare, why not read my post about the Minimus plan from a few weeks ago.
Now those posts and the page on our site talk about features. You get lots of one thing, oodles of another etc., etc., but is that why we stand over our prices?
Did we increase the cost of our entry level hosting plan?
Yes. But it shouldn’t really matter when you look at what we’ve given you in return. I’d go so far as to say that we’ve actually slashed our prices.
Not convinced?
Let’s put things into perspective for a moment.
If you ignore the huge disk space, the powerful control panel and all those wonderful features we keep talking about, what are you left with?
You’re left with a reliable service to host your business email and website for a year.
If you wanted to run an advert in a small local paper which is read by your next door neighbour and a few of your friends, how much would you pay out?
What if you wanted to run an advert in a national newspaper or magazine?
Do you honestly think that you’d get very far with what we charge you for a full year’s worth of online presence?
I somehow doubt it.
And what about technical support?
Yes. I’ll be the first to admit that our new hosting platform is a hell of a lot more intuitive and easier to use than its predecessor, so maybe you won’t need our technical support team’s help as much as before.
Being able to manage everything from the one place is pretty cool, even if I do say so myself.
But what about those times when you run into a problem?
What about those odd issues or queries that crop up?
Our technical support team will always do their very best to assist our clients make the most of their hosting experience with us.
Don’t believe me?
Why would you?
But what about what our other clients have been saying?
Take a minute or two to read some of their comments
My personal favourite has to be:
“The only bad thing about Blacknight is they make the experience of dealing with other companies’ support comparatively worse” (admittedly the original version contained more colourful language, but you get the drift!)
So if you want cheap and nasty hosting, please feel free to visit our competitors, but if you want a cost effective home for your website, then you know where to find us.
Michele,
Well done for putting it so well. How anyone can moan about paying €4 per month for hundreds of people to see their company brochure or shop and for hundreds/thousands of company emails to be received is beyond me.
I worked for an Australian portal site and in the early days we hosted with an established US host (that has been bought out since). We suffered weekly outages and rubbish support for a while before moving on. They used to have the site offline EVERY Monday morning for about three hours (during Sydney business hours). We also went through some budget hosts for some of our clients and got nothing but grief.
I have to say, I have never heard anyone complaining about Blacknight’s service. Sureley €4 per month (!) is a very small price to pay for a “fire and forget” service that you can depend on?
Let the cheapskates spend their business hours chasing their tails is what I say and let those who appreciate good service pay what is still small money and get on with their day.
At the end of the day, you get what you pay for. In saying that, as a very happy customer, I think Blacknight provide above and beyond what I pay them for. If excellent support and service is important to you, than your pricing is extremely cost effective and affordable.
For “entry level” hosting that’s actually much more than entry level, €4 a month is a bargain.
Dave
Michele … you probably already know my feelings on this but after my experience with my US host I went over to ye and I have to say I haven’t looked back. I originally got the old equivalent of the Minimus package (I forget the name) and was damn happy … a few issues I must admit bugged me with the name server stuff but every host has its quirks. The new system is however excellent. I also ended up taking a VPS a few months with ye and I’m loving the freedom with it.
I’m always surprised by people not willing to spend on their hosts / web designers / developers (obviously I’m not coming from the hosting side of things) but when you look at 4 quid a month its really crazy that they’ll choose a crappy US host and have lots of downtime. They’ll blow 1 – 2k on an advert in a paper which has a lifetime of probably less than a day.
In my estimation ye are currently the best hosting company (support + uptime) in Ireland and yes I’ve dealt with most of the bigger players.
OK that sounded like shameless plugging of ye and I guess it was but well I’m happy so why not let the rest of Ireland know.
What a fantastic way to put it Michele. You get what you pay for with most things in life and when it comes to hosting, I’d rater pay that (TINY) bit extra for the support and all around better level of service.
I’d gladly pay more for my morning coffee if it gave me the extra uptime that Blacknight provides. 🙂
I consistently recommend blacknight to people and nobody has ever come back with complaints. The people are great and the facilities are excellent.
Thanks for the supportive and positive comments guys 🙂
I’m totally surprised people would accuse you of overpricing – what nonsense! I deal with several different hosting companies (usually because some clients insist in using others). I never get anything like the level of service as I do with Blacknight. The new plans are great value and the support is fantasic. Keep up the good work!
Just to add my “Two Cents” worth. I can not commend the Blacknight Support Team Highly enough. James, Lee and Tara and crew have always responded promptly and help me on many different support requests. As for the being Highly priced? My sites with blacknight load quicker and perform better than any I have with other hosting companies. Will be staying with blacknight. A job well done guys.
Chris / Alan
Thanks for your kind words. I’ll be sure to tell the support team to read the comments
Michele
Michele,
I like your writing comparing the cost of coffee and croissant to your webhost price. Indeed €4.95 is really very low price for web hosting. Usually in the market it is priced like 4.95 but is per month charges.
Thanks for the post and good luck in hosting. I will definitely take a try with blacknight sooner or later.