Webs.com is $99.95 a year. Where is webs.com ranked? Is this a bad deal?

Posted by kent on December 1st, 2009

The following post in our Reader Question series is an actual user submitted question. To maintain the integrity of the original question, we do not edit or change reader questions in any way.

Q: I have a free website with webs.com and I haven't had any traffic at all in 5 or 6 months!  I want to get a domain name but I don't know whether to cancel my website and make another one with someone else or what.  They are wanting $99.95 a year to free domain and the price is for the enhanced premium package.  I think this is high compared to other companies.  Where is webs.com ranked?  Is this a bad deal?  What is your suggestion on what I shoul do?

A: That's a big decision. There are tremendous benefits to having your own domain name (though that alone won't guarantee traffic). We did a little research on webs.com to see how it might compare to the products we've reviewed. It's a little frustrating, because they don't give a complete rundown on what they offer for $99.95 a year (even finding out the price was not easy, until we'd signed up for their free account).

Unfortunately, you don't get that much more for your $99.95: The ads go away, you get 5 email addresses, and your own domain. There are storage limitations, though at 1000GB it's not a real limitation. The 30-item limitation on your web store could be. Strictly by the numbers, you'd do better with just about any web host we've reviewed.

Webs.com comes closest to Yahoo! Small Business hosting in terms of ease-of-use, though Yahoo! is a much more scalable solution and has far fewer limitations. While your first year is cheaper with Yahoo! ($89.55), your second year will cost more ($120.00). You get a far better bargain with a multi-year plan from FatCow or HostMonster (which charge around $4.00 per month), but there's a slightly higher learning curve. Lunarpages has a great site builder, and is fairly easy to use (though not as user-friendly as Yahoo! Small Business) though it too gets a little expensive after the first year. Depending on your needs, GoDaddy could even be a good option for you.