They Ought To Be Ashamed...

My husband is pretty good at web site design. He's been studying flash at school, builds beautiful flash presentations for our kids, and has done several web sites for both himself and other people. Since he did the web site at our previous church, when he got to the new church, he was the most qualified person to do the job of webmaster here as well.

Our church already has a web site up using a company called Easy Address. It's one of those cookie cutter places that gives you tools to put your own web site together. We are not impressed. The site is very expensive ($24.95 a month if you sign up for a year's service). For that price, you get 50 MB of storage, 20 email accounts, and their church templates.

Me and my husband have a couple of domains that we pay $5.95 a month for. For 1/4 of the Easyaddress price, we have 300 GB of space, unlimited subdomains and unlimited email addresses, and 1000 GB of transfer space per month. It also comes with one
free domain name, a bulletin board, and a shopping cart. Sure, it does not come with the fancy church templates, but $19.00 a month for the church templates? Personally, I think it's highway robbery what Easy Address is charging.

What I think is worst, is that they are charging this outrageous price in what they call a "church plan". Like they are doing churches a special favor by offering this service. They ought to be ashamed, is my response.

Our church site is pretty small, but using their special church templates, it is taking up 25 MB of their space. My husband, who makes very nice flash web sites, has never made a site that takes up that much space. With all the sermons, he could do the whole site in 10-15 MB.

Godaddy.com, which offers a comparable service to what Easy Address sells, offers a site building program called Web Site Tonight, that charges $10.40 a month, offering 4 GB of space, 400 email addresses, and web mail. So if you compare Easy Address to a close competitor, they are still twice as expensive.

I'm sure Easy Address knows that their service is highly overpriced, and they prey upon people that don't know any better. We are trying to get a refund for the remaining 8 months that our church prepaid for so my husband can put up a far superior design up for a fraction of the price.