Which kind of website should you buy: A stand alone website that takes longer but doesn’t depend on another service? Or a hosted solution that uses a common system and is much cheaper? There’s actually a big risk and hidden peril in hosted solutions that is catching more and more companies by surprise. It’s important to know the differences and how the wrong solution might hurt.
Hosted solutions tend to be cheaper than stand alone websites because maintenance for the development company is significantly easier. They only have to manage one core location and all the websites on their network will be updated.
Whilst this seems like a good idea and an easy way to keep your costs low, the key problem with a hosted solution setup is that when things go bad, they can really go bad. We’ve seen instances where the company in the background has suffered financial or operational issues and all sites using their system have gone down. Or some might constrain hosting options when you want to change later. It is highly likely that your website cannot be ‘moved’ to another server. This is because all the databases are joined. All the code of part of a larger framework. Even if you do manage to get your hands on your files, they will be more or less useless as they are just a portion of a bigger picture. And that bigger picture was in place to get as much hosting revenue as possibly for as little work as possible.
This is why hosted solutions are significantly cheaper than stand alone. The main revenue comes from your years of hosting and ongoing maintenance with the hosting company, coupled with the fact that moving away will mean a whole new website and a cost to your business.
By choosing a stand alone website implementation you will be securing your company’s website from the event that if catastrophe strikes your web host, you can take your files and place them on another server and back in business in a matter of hours.
At Strategy and Action we not only give you all your source code and the ‘keys’ to your server but we also give you a stand alone website and hosting environment so that you CAN move freely with your website whenever you wish.
