Online Event Registration: September 2009

Building your own online event registration system sounds like a great investment, but programming and maintaining your own system can be much more expensive and time consuming than you might expect.

As an online registration company, it would appear biased for us to recommend not building your own online registration system. That aside, we truly believe that you’ll be much further ahead if you use a professional registration system (even if it’s not ours) than building your own.

For us, we would rather lose business to a quality competitor than hear we lost business due to someone planning on building their own registration system. Although well intentioned there are some very important business requirements to consider.

1. A basic online event registration system can take months to build. Every possible situation must be considered, designed, built, tested and documented.

2. There are many potential and actual costs involved with building your own online event registration system:

1. Quality programmers will start at $75,000/year
2. Management time to administer programmers, designers etc. $60,000+/year
3. Testing and “bug fixing”
4. Server hosting – $1000+/month ($9.99/month shared hosting doesn’t deliver professional results)
5. Software licensing for server operating systems and database software, $4000. Additionally, the software will need to be updated as your business requirements and technologies change
6. Server and system maintenance – 20+ hours a month
7. System support (tech support and troubleshooting for clients and their customers)
8. System updates/adding features
9. PCI certificate and audit each year – $3000+
10. System backups
11. Lost business/additional staff costs (for manual or assisted event registration) if the system is down