Commodity Hosting services, such as GoDaddy, make building websites a cheap and apparently easy prospect for many small businesses and individuals but are they really the best option? What is the overall risk of getting locked down in a long term venture with such services and are you really saving as much money as expected as opposed to a full Internet Property Management (IPM) company such as Netsville?
Customer Service and What It Means to Your Business
If your website doesn’t contribute to your bottom line, that’s another problem to be discussed, but hosting your website with a commodity service may not be the best option. If your website does contribute to your bottom line, the question you should ask yourself is why would it be prudent to host somewhere where you are one of a million customers, especially if your contribution to the hosting company’s bottom line is borderline insignificant. Commodity hosting companies make money by cutting costs through the streamlining of operations and treating every customer as they are a round peg that fits in a round hole. If you are a square peg, there will be friction and your bottom line will suffer.
IPM services, on the other hand, offer personalized contact and consultation. They understand what is necessary to maintaining a successful Internet Property, providing their customers with a single point of contact to deliver a cohesive, close-knit service that would otherwise be an overwhelming venture to others. They will manage the property’s architects, plumbers, gardeners, and handymen necessary to produce and refine a successful website.
Cost and the Effect of Nickel and Diming
The primary way commodity hosting services make their profits is by attracting customers with their initial advertised low prices. It becomes a race to the bottom with each new provider offering hosting at a lower price point than the previous one. That’s great news for the consumer, granting them an opportunity to save money – that is, if their website is a static brochure with little traffic, no need for updates, and devoid of technical issues. If this describes your website, then why have a website at all?
A website needs to be a living organism that is constantly changing and evolving. That is what drives higher search engine rankings thereby attracting repeat eyeball visits. It’s the very reason to have a website in the first place. IPM pricing is all-inclusive of the periodic maintenance necessary to make your website successful. With a commodity hosting outfit, you are financially discouraged from maintaining and improving your website because each interaction with the hosting company results in additional charges. When those nickels and dimes add up at the end of each month, it won’t seem like much of a commodity anymore.
Endless, Distracting Add-Ons
GoDaddy has often been criticized with besieging its customers with countless ads, coupons, discounts, specials during their order process. By the time their customers are ready to complete their orders, the volume they’ve waded through may have significantly raised their monthly fee from the original low-advertised price. And it doesn’t just end there. In addition to the nickel and diming sited above, every time you need to perform changes on your website, you are forced to traverse through yet another obstacle course of ads – some of which are masked to looked like they’re part of the interface leaving inexperienced users with the risk of signing up for something they never intended to.
With IPM hosting, these are issues that do not exist. While they will work with you in maintaining and building your website, they will also provide you with the necessary tools and knowledge required to make any manual changes if necessary through a clean interface, optimized with a good user design experience.
High End Technical Services
IPM companies can provide consumers with many additional high-end technical services, going far beyond of what most commodity hosts can offer in their packages. Netsville, for instance, will provide customers with two websites – one for
production and one for development. As the philosophy of IPM dictates that Internet property is a living, breathing organism, it becomes vital to implement changes on a development site for testing and quality assurance before it becomes public. It’s one of Netsville’s best practices. The last desire of any small business is discovering that their untested new update has a major problem that shuts down their site.
For higher end customers, Netsville can provide redundant production servers in multiple data centers tied together with data replication and DNS failover services. These technologies provide near 100% uptime for mission critical website that you simply can’t get that from a commodity hosting provider.
Based in Rochester, New York, Netsville is an Internet Property Management company specializing in managing the Digital Marketing, Technical, and Business Solutions for our customers since 1994. For more information, please click here.
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