Since I wrote the “Own vs Rent: Why Hosting Your Blog or Web Site on Someone Else’s Platform is a Bad Idea” it bugged me that I must talk about the positive side to having someone else take care of your web site needs. I’ve recently joined Medium in addition to being a member on a few other sites and I love the collaborative features on Medium. These days when everyone is creating their very own and unique yet-another-instagram or yet-another-youtube or yet-another-facebook it was nice to see something refreshing and useful.
So why, even considering all the points from previous post, it may still make sense to have your web site on someone else’s ground?
1. A Large Community. If your product is, ultimately, a text (reviews, blog posts, rants, whatever) – you are writing for other people to read and respond. Having a community around helps a great deal – people are more likely to respond when they are a part of the same network. That’s how Tumblr, Medium operate and that’s why Livejournal is still twitching although it should have died painful and miserable death years before MySpace. Having a community is probably the heaviest argument towards having your blog on a network vs. hosting on your own. You can (and probably should) crosspost back to your own blog for the reasons stated in previous post (network may shut down or make your posts invisible), but ultimately the easier people can interact with you and your blog the better. Same can be said about the likes of Etsy or eBay – it’s a marketplace where people come to buy things, so you may just as well participate. The more channels you sell through the better.
2. Performance Considerations. If you are on your own and haven’t made it big time yet – chances are your site hosting resources aren’t anywhere near the capacities of big players. Sudden spike in visits or (let’s think positive) a steady surge may send your web site into a crawl or make it unavailable. Big networks almost always can handle high loads better. Additionally, there are services that are tailored for supporting specific platforms (like WP-Engine for WordPress blogs). Their costs are usually slightly higher than ordinary hosting’s but they will take care of the shining the bells and cleaning the whistles of your platform.
3. A Piece Of Mind. Knowing that a dedicated team of developers whose (hopefully) full time jobs are keeping your site up and running makes it easier to concentrate on other matters of your business. Of course, you can always get a case of LiveJournal, that has been steadily progressing from bad to worse to completely unreliable, but it’s rather an exception. Picking a right resource may just be good enough to do the job you want it to do. Compared to finding a developer or a team that is capable of steady performance given the intermittent task structure you inevitably will have is a deed of it’s own.
4. Price Considerations. If the hardest technical challenge you ever overcame was changing background on your iPhone to your selfie, taking care of technical matters may end up being too costly – with finding and paying the right person to support your site and all. Paying for service that does just the right amount of work for you may turn out to be less expensive while providing enough features for your needs. On top of that hosting and maintenance of well known popular platforms is almost a commodity now, so large companies can give a better price compared to small time shops.
5. Features That Otherwise Would Be Hard To Get. If you don’t know what “PCI compliance” really is – you have never really done e-commerce. Additionally, certain providers may allow you to accept payments in different currencies, add marketing features or sell goods that otherwise would be impossible or too complicated to set up on your own. Some (like Amazon) will even warehouse your inventory to shorten the trip to the consumer. Such features are hard to beat especially when they come as a part of a package.
6. Security Considerations. In these days where even big names like Target and Home Depot become victims of hacker attacks it’s easy to imagine that breaking into a small time shop on a small time server wouldn’t be a big deal for a determined hacker. By sticking with a larger provider you reducing the risk of being brought offline and in case it happens – reducing the downtime itself. Large companies have the capacity, knowledge and resources to employ security solutions that are way over the head any small or medium businesses. There is, of course, no silver bullet, but decreasing chances of downtime is worth paying extra if it comes to that.
7. Scalability. You are building your business to grow. So what if your site starts getting ten times more visitors, or even hundred times more. The platform you used before may not be enough – either your server is too weak or the platform you chose isn’t optimized. This could be a pretty scary race against time when you scramble to find people and make decisions on how to upgrade or where to move without full understanding of what you really need. Having a (supposedly) highly qualified team that could answer these questions in an instant – just because they’ve been down that road before multiple times – is invaluable, especially when your web site is crawling under heavy load of new clients.
It’s rather obvious that no single tool is good for all jobs. Picking whether to get your own piece of internet real estate or get into a community with shared parking lot and garbage collection is an important decision that directly affects the future of the business.
You’ve watched that amazing commercial from Wix or SquareSpace or Weebly or what-not-else-is-out-three and decided that you want to blog about fashion or your own brand or your own skin care line and you need a web site. Because internet and because it so simple they actually show it in 15 second spot on TV, between cereal and shampoo commercials. Great, you think, I’ll get myself one of those and start a web site. Sometimes even for free or for a price of cup of coffee per month. Because we all want instant gratification and we want to post our first Facebook update “Yo, I’ve got a fashion blog and here’s my first post about fashion”.
Now that you are concerned enough – what can you do and what should you do if you already have a blog on someone else’s network? For example, if you have a blog on Wix or Blogger or something else?
I really really REALLY don’t think there will be only one post about customers. Really. But I had to start somewhere, so here goes.
We started ringing up deal sites. It was a bit unexpected (although understandable) when some of the sites refused to deal with a new business because it was new business. Other sites couldn’t care less. Groupon was the first to take us on, their only focus was pricing – they low balled us to something almost totally outrageous. We haven’t had much experience with any deal sites from the merchant perspective, so it was sort of a revelation to find out how these sites treat both merchants and customers. Words like “customer loyalty” and “quality customer base” started making a whole new world of sense.
Strange as it seems there actually is a difference between clients coming different coupon sites. The deep dive probably deserve a separate post altogether, but in a nutshell – we’ve seen the worst coming from Groupon and Lifebooker, the rest are marginally better. One thing where you may regret having loyal coupon customers is when they like you so much they keep buying vouchers all over the place – whatever it takes as long as they keep getting treatments at your place at coupon price. They will never convert and they keep bringing more loyal coupon users, so we decided to force “New customers only” rule on most of our deal contracts after the first wave. It may not sound nice to customers, but it’s a way to cut losses. If they like our services so much they should definitely try to negotiate a deal (and it’s always a possibility with the business like this), instead of trying to cheat your way through.