I remember back through the smokey haze of 1998, when a leafy aspect meant more than a weekend’s rake, I put my first site with the mother of all local hosts; the litmus of “how much is too much?”; the…. ahhh, let me just refer to them as WebCentral.

Back then, when “metatags” was not a dirty word and popups came out of a toaster – for about 2 or 3 weeks, I had no idea what was a reasonable amount to pay for hosting. Sure, I knew, as well as the next guy building his site in Frontpage, that there was some correlation between fees and how cool the control panel looked, like, sheeeeat….. that’s obvious! But everything else – the nightly vigils, the tireless examination of sectors and chronic defraging, the auto-submits and intense domain name desquabblefying – man, that shit was off the wall. However, I figured something was amiss when I received charges for something called “domain parking”. Like around $160 per annum for each domain.

Man, I thought, how difficult is it to park one of these suckers anyway? What ongoing resources must it eat up to justify the charges levied? Huh? I looked around the net and couldn’t see anyone else charging to park a domain, some people even laughed when I suggested it – so I rang WebCentral and asked “what gives?” – and you know what happened? Without even a whimper they quickly removed the charges – I mean I was expecting an argument – you know, some kind of justification – “Well you see it costs $160.00 because we have to rotate the tyres every week” – but…. nothing.

And, (you’ll have to picture this) – this is where the heavens opened and I was bathed in the Mo***r fucker of all heavenly lights and I saw the truth and heard the voice of wisdom. And what the voice appeared to be saying was that “if you can get away with it – do it, if someone raises an objection then stop it – but wait ’til they object first”

It cast an interesting light on how they arrived at their pricing.

But there was an upside – for the voice also said – “Man – don’t waste your money on all that software shit – download the cracked versions – teach yourself web design – when you are making money then buy the genuine article – maybe.”