@Mark, you're putting words in my mouth.
But rather than get into a tit for tat let me give you the history and rational behind BCA Web Services.
Web Services started in 2004 just before BCA became into existance. Lest it be accused of being old fashioned and irrelevent having a website was essential. In fact BCA hosts and pays for many websites which now include BCA, BCRA, Cave Registry & Archive, Caving Library, Try Caving, Ghar Parau, several of the Regional Councils and Access Bodies and several of the rescue organisations.
At the time shared hosting was expensive and poorly featured. For that many websites it was cost effective to purchase one virtual server (VPS) to host all the sites. Another benefit is that it would also give BCA complete control over the server as though they owned the hardware. So for example shell access is possible. For example we could install SVN, essential for the cave registry and archive site. Krystal is a good offering, but even they won't install server-side software like SVN for you! We can solve our own problems rather than relying on third party support (although 3rd party support is available).
As I said, hosting at the time was expensive and poorly featured. Once you have a VPS it is very little extra work to host other domains. It was an obvious step to offer hosting to the clubs. They would benefit from cheap hosting and more features than available at the time, such as databases, unlimited email accounts, unlimited bandwidth, cPanel, mailing lists, etc, etc. The more who sign up the cheaper it would become because Web Services has never been run to make a profit. BCA would benefit because it would help defray the costs of the VPS. Win win.
The webservers are hosted with the award winning memset.com. So the servers are professional managed and maintained. They run cPanel (as per Krystal) which patches itself and the server daily. We have access to Memset for support issues but on average there is less than 1 support call per year. The servers are extremely reliable (>99.99%).
What is available in the market now, 13 years later, has improved on both price and features but BCA's offering is still extremely good value for money. For a typical club website we are cheaper than Krystal at ?25/year + domain at ?6/year (cf ?36 + ?10.50).
On support we are up front that it is provided by volunteers and won't be quite as immediate as a company like Krystal. That's the deal. In practice I get a club support query about once a month accross more than 50 odd sites hosted. It really is that reliable.
Much as I'd like to just go caving, BCA does need an IT service for internal and external reasons. Since the it has to be done anyway, if we can provide our members with a useful service at very little extra effort, why not?