Last week we explored the main differences between various options you have when it comes to hosting for your site. At the bottom of the heap was shared hosting: limited, but adequate for many beginner sites.

With your own shared hosting account, you still have control over your site – you can access all your files, databases, and what-have-you, and you have complete freedom to move elsewhere if you ever need to.

There’s actually an option that’s a step below shared hosting, and that is to have your site on someone else’s shared hosting account, where they’re also hosting other client sites. Read on and we’ll see why this is a bad bad bad idea.

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Once upon a time, there was a business owner named Maggie. Maggie sold sprockets, and she was darn good at it, but she needed a Web presence to boost her business. Now, being a fledgling company, Maggie didn’t have the resources for a big expensive site. So she hired her friend Igor to build her a site. Igor was really a t-shirt designer, and he didn’t know a lot about building a Web site, and he certainly didn’t know anything about strategies to convert visitors into customers. But Igor built a site that was adequate, though not spectacular.

He also offered to buy her domain name for her, and host it for her on his server. Besides having just started out in business, Maggie also didn’t know the first thing about the Web, so she agreed to have Igor handle everything, without asking questions like “Will I be able to make changes to the site if I need to?” and “Will I be able to access my files and data later on?”

Years passed. Maggie’s rather plain site didn’t bring her any business, and every day her site looked older and older as the rest of the Web moved on without her.

One day Maggie signed up for the biannual Sprocket Trade Show, where all the sprocket buyers in the region would be coming to meet with sprocket vendors like herself. She said to herself, “Self, this Web site really isn’t working and if you’re going to grow your business like you want to, you need to hire a professional to update it. Igor simply isn’t cutting it anymore.” Maggie knew this was right, but she didn’t answer herself. She was introspective, after all, and not crazy.

So Maggie went out and hired the Web firm Interwebs4You to give her site a face-lift and turn it into a revenue machine. I4Y helped her buy her own hosting space, and advised Maggie that they would need access to her site on Igor’s server, as well as access to the domain name registrar account so they could point it to the new server when they were done.

When Maggie told Igor about this, he was furious. He rent his garments and gnashed his teeth and yelled obscenities. He also mentioned that because her site was hosted with dozens of others on his own shared server, there was no way he could allow I4Y access, lest they get access to all the other sites too.

Now Maggie was in a pickle. The trade show was a scant two weeks away, and time was of the essence. With Igor dragging his feet and also refusing to release the domain name to Maggie’s ownership, there was nothing I4Y could do but to start from scratch with a less desirable domain name. Thanks to the delays caused by Igor, the site wasn’t ready in time for the trade show, and Maggie lost out on two new clients that would have led to untold riches. Instead they signed with Rival Sprockets Inc.

Moral: Don’t be a Maggie. Make sure that any new site you buy belongs to YOU, and no one else. (See also: Own Your Own Domain Name)

 

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