The Truth about Web Pages

"Make hay while the sun shines" seems to be the Indian web service provider's war cry. Time to set the record straight

One of the saddest things about anything new is that there are any number of people who'll sell it to you at enormously inflated prices. The world wide web is no exception, and here in India, where awareness is just beginning to spread, I have been seeing people bending over backwards trying to make a fast buck by offering web-page hosting services.

One of the cruellest examples of this is our own desi VSNL - the Internet monopoly of India, who recently announced that they would offer you web pages at mind boggling prices of Rs.5,000 per page!

This episode of COMversations is therefore dedicated to putting a pin into this info-highway robbery.

To web or not to web, that's the question…

The World Wide Web is a classic example of simple technology being used to maximum effect. There is nothing new about the technology itself - it is just a variation of TCP/IP based services that have been around since 1969, and even the page-definition standard (HTML) is a variant of a very commonly used page markup language called SGML. The hyper-link based layout of the web has been around ever since people could spell "gopher".

What made the web so famous was the emergence of software that gracefully tied the whole thing together - the Web Browser. These days, there are effectively two of them - Netscape's Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Both of them are designed to transfer and display pages from the Internet, full of text, graphics, colour, even sound and video.

Naturally, business sat up immediately - the fact that this cheap and effective technology could be used to target markets through advertising and customer support did not escape them. In no time at all, everyone wanted to be on the web,, no matter how big or how small the business was.

In 1995, India finally got publicly accessible Internet services through VSNL, and the demand for Indian web pages soon skyrocketed. I use my own e-mail box as a barometer for this - more than 30%" of the thousands of messages I receive monthly ask me where one could put up web pages for the company's services, products or just corporate information. Every student wants his own personal homepage, every company wants its own website.

Enter the scalper….

Who does not know them the little men who stand at street corners not far from the cinema showing the latest Amitabh Bachchan blockbuster, hawking hard to get tickets at phenomenal prices. Sometimes, they corner the entire block of sellable tickets, so that the only way you can get to see the movie is by coughing up.

The web service market in India is not different these days. Every day a new "service" pops up out of the blue, offering various web services in various forms.

Some of them offer you pages as a sub-portion of their own pages (for example, you could be located at http://somevendor.com/homepages/scalper/yourcompany.html), basically a single page (or set of pages) that are part of the scalper's own pages, which he would have got for a ridiculously low price of $20/month, and which he is now hawking to you at Rs.50,000 upwards! This is by far the most commonly found "service".

The other kind of services are those who offer to register a site in your own name (e.g. http://www.yourcompany.com) where you can then put up your own pages. While this is much more desirable, the price tag is virtually always in multi-lakhs!

The third kind, now beginning to make an appearance, are the "Internet Marketing Experts" who will put up your pages as part of their own pages, which are "targeted" at business communities, and they then promise you that they will help spread the word about your pages. These services typically position themselves as marketing experts, offering complete "packages".

The truth is…

The truth is a real eye-opener.

First of all, many people believe that getting web space is difficult. In fact, it is simpler than tuning your TV. There are literally thousands of web service providers out there (check out the "Web Presence Providers" section on http://www.yahoo.com) who will put up your pages for as little as $3 per month! That is around Rs.100 per month!

There are also lots of free services available - while not the fastest sites on the planet, they are a good place to start - www.tripod.com and www.geocities.com are two good examples.

You will need web space, of course - a place where you can put up your pages. Shopping around should result in you finding a decent place for around $50 a month for about 2 MB of web space. There are bigger and faster places, but easy does it - let's first get our act together.

CompuServe members get 2 MB of web space free along with their basic subscription of $10 per month, a similar deal exists with America Online and Prodigy. Both Kishore Bhargava and I have had our pages on CompuServe for a long time - the servers are very fast, and it is very easy to update information. People ask me why I still use CompuServe in this age of Internet services - well, now you know. (That isn't the only reason why we use CompuServe, but definitely one of them).

www.yourcompany.com

If you want to have your own domain (e.g. www.yourcompany.com), that can be arranged, too, and it costs about $250 to register your domain. All you need is a Internet Service Provider (ISP) who is willing to "service" your virtual domain - usually a one time payment of $50 covers that. The whole process of actually getting a domain name is ridiculously simple (check out http://www.cnet.com/Content/Features/Howto/Domain/ for more details) - the most difficult part is thinking of a name for your site!

One nice thing about your own domain name is that it can point at whatever location you currently use for your web pages. If your current provider is too slow or crowded - switch to another one, and have him service your domain name!

You can also achieve this effect by making use of a re-director service. I use POBOX.COM, which redirects my email and homepage requests to places I want them to go to. Therefore, when you send mail to achitnis@pobox.com, it actually goes to whatever e-mail address I wish to use at that moment. Telling your browser to connect to http://pobox.com/~achitnis actually takes you to my CompuServe pages. If I suddenly change my web page location or real email address, all I need to do is to change the record at POBOX (for more details, go to http://pobox.com/pobox).

Pages, pages…

One of the most ridiculous concepts currently making its rounds in India is the concept of selling web space by the page. Almost every vendor of such services tries to sell you web space at anything from Rs.500 to Rs.50,000 "per page". VSNL joined the scalper gang when it announced a price of Rs.5,000 "per page", with extra charges for every graphic you place on the page. Yesterday, I had a very reputed IT company dropping in on me, making me a "special offer" of Rs.1,50,000 for a set of pages!

The real picture is that outside India, no one sells "pages" - they sell web space. You contract for a fixed amount of space - typically 2-5MB to begin with. It is unlikely that you will use more than that in the initial stages. If you have seen my web pages at http://pobox.com/~achitnis - the whole complex setup occupies just under 1 MB of space! Be reasonable in your estimates - more is not always better.

Some providers rent you web space, charging you an extra amount for every thousand "hits" to the site (i.e. every time someone visits your pages, it is counted as a hit). If your site is going to get very popular (I rack up about 25,000 hits a month on my homepage), this could become very expensive. Make sure you are aware of this.

One thing is clear - if any vendor shows up at your door with a per-page pricing, show him the door. If he starts talking about extra charges per graphic on your page, call the cops.

Dollar Troubles

One major stumbling block that steers many Indian web-wannabes towards web-scalpers is the fact that virtually all the web sites we are talking about here are located outside India - in fact, almost all of them are located in the USA.

This brings up two perceived problems - that of Dollar payments, and that of maintenance.

The first problem is actually negligible. These days, all you need to do is go to the Reserve Bank of India, purchase an International Money Order for the Dollar amount, and send it to the web service provider. The RBI will have no objection to this, since it falls under the magazine subscription category. So don't fall for the convenience of "Rupee payments" - anyone offering such a facility for web services typically charges you more than 10 times the actual cost.

Foreign Shores…

The second perceived problem, that of the site actually being outside India, is actually a laughable one. The Internet knows no political boundaries, and you can use your normal VSNL Internet account (Shell or TCP/IP) to maintain the remote site. That's what Kishore and I have been doing for ages. Page updates are usually done by using FTP to upload pages onto the site.

But lo and behold, the India web scalper finds another "chargeable loophole" - some vendors attempt to charge you for every update to your pages. Immediately pick up the phone and dial 100 and report the perpetrator under Indian Penal Code Section 420 - he is trying to take you for a ride. You are contracting for the space, and nothing else. The vendor has no right to limit or charge you for individual page updates. In fact, no service provider outside India actually has a charge for each update. That is just a "the customer is dumb, let's milk him" angle tagged on by the web space provider in India.

Note that almost every web space provider in India is actually only an agent for a provider in the USA. There severe disadvantages to physically locating a web server in India - the biggest one being the cost and the second one being speed. Web servers abroad are typically connected to the net via T1 (1.5 mbps) links. In India, where a 64 kbps link costs your Rs.12,00,000, a fast link is well beyond the financial capabilities of most people.

Therefore, you could actually benefit from a web-scalper's visit - find out who his actual provider is, then contact the provider directly in the USA and strike a deal at a fraction of the cost.

Getting the word out

As discussed earlier, some services in India offer to spread the word about your pages, at an extra cost. What they are actually doing is to simply register your pages with all the various search engines available on the web - something your can do yourself in under an hour.

Just visit each search engine (check out www.search.com for a list of them), and make use of the "Add URL" option to register your pages with that search engine. In due time, the search engine will "visit" your page and index it. Just make sure that you have a good description of your pages and services at the very beginning of the home page, since search engines typically present that first paragraph along with the page URL if it matches the search criteria of a search engine user.

Other ways of spreading the word is to incorporate your web address (the URL - Universal Resource Locator) in all your email, letters, visiting cards, advertisements, press releases, etc. In fact, these are probably the best known ways to ensure that people find out about your web pages.

The real cost

Finally, let's talk about the really expensive, and often overlooked, part of maintaining web pages.

Creating web pages is actually very easy, and most people can learn to do it in under an hour. But just having the ability to create pages does not automatically give you the ability to make good looking pages.

Face it - not everyone was born an artist. My pages survive because of their content - if one would go by their looks, I'd get at the most a dozen hits a year. Recognising this, I opted for the KISS (keep it simple, stupid!) principle - I avoided all sort of extra graphical gimmickry apart from the bare necessities.

However, that won't do for everyone, especially a company trying to establish an online presence. Too many companies have permanently scarred their images by putting up amateurical, badly designed pages, with either too many graphics, or none at all, with too much text, bad English, suspect Grammar, etc.

This is the time to call in Web Designer - someone who will design your pages for you, create the framework you will use to make information available, etc.

Now these Web Designers are not always cheap. In fact, they can be outrageously expensive, but unlike the scalper web service provider, this expense is justifiable. Being creative, and having the ability to produce good looking pages for you is the work someone with an artistic slant. Not everyone is blessed with this ability, and probably the worst are the website providers themselves.

If you really need to spend money, spend it on a good Web Designer. Choosing one is easy - every Web Designer should be able to give you a list of Web URLs of pages he has already designed. Have a look at them (using a TCP/IP account and a browser such as Netscape) and compare them to other pages you have seen. Some unscrupulous people actually give fake references - pointing you to pages they claim to have designed, which is actually not true. If the prospective web designer's name is not shown anywhere on the pages, feel free to email the owner of the web pages you are looking at, asking if the pages were indeed designed by the web designer who claims to have done so.

Also remember that a good web designer will concentrate on the art, not the service. Beware of people offering "all-in-one" deals where they will host your pages as well as design them - I have heard horror stories in that department.

Signing off

Whew, this turned out much longer than I had anticipated.

Before I sign off - I receive tons of requests from people to list their web addresses on my pages. You must understand that I can do so only if there is a very good reason to do so (for example, if your pages contain information that could be of interest to visitors apart from company specific information). So please keep that in mind before sending me a note about it.

Cheerio!

+++ATH0

<click>

NO CARRIER