There are often reviews and rankings of contractors posted by former employers and vice versa so it behooves both sides to behave professionally and responsibly. However, the websites do not indemnify the work of contractors.

The websites typically take a 6 percent to 10 percent cut of the fee negotiated between the two parties. Some sites offer to hold funds in escrow until the job is completed to the employer's satisfaction. In some cases, employers negotiate to pay a portion up front, a portion halfway through the job, and the rest upon completion.

Rock Blanco, chief technology officer at Atlas Travel International, a 130-employee travel agency in Milford, Massachusetts, used Rentacoder.com last year to find computer programmers to write software to synthesize and analyze customer data. He ended up accepting a bid from a Russian outfit and paid them in three installments as they reached benchmarks in the project.

"I was blown away by the job they did," he said. The cost was about a third of what it would have been if done locally. "They also delivered two weeks early."

This was largely due to the time difference, which allowed him and his Russian coders to jointly work on the project 24 hours a day. They traded e-mails and talked periodically using an inexpensive, VoIP phone service.  Blanco was so impressed that he recently hired the Russian programmers to do another job.  

However, Blanco has also had bad experiences, including an unsuccessful attempt to collaborate with an Indian software-development company that had sent him an email solicitation. "It was a lost in translation thing," he said. "I couldn't get them to even understand that I wanted red instead of blue" as background on a Web page.

That's why he was careful when hiring the Russian programmers to make sure that there was a contact in United States that could step in if there were any communication breakdowns.

The appeal of having a stateside interpreter and coordinator when dealing with foreign vendors has led to the creation of several outsourcing consultancies. Inventure Global in San Diego and Sumpraxis of Boca Raton, Florida, specialize in matching small- and medium-size businesses with foreign vendors, and overseeing projects until completion. They charge hundreds of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the scope of the project.

John Buchanan, founder of Wise Guides, a Chicago company with four full-time and two part-time employees that publishes guides to major-league ballparks, tapped Sumpraxis to find inexpensive overseas talent to quickly redesign his website in advance of opening day of this year's baseball season.