I recently went home (to NJ, I moved recently to VA Beach) and ran into an acquaintance/slight friend. He had contacted me about SEO for his employer's real estate brokerage site. Well his company had gone to my former employer - the real estate website company - and was working with them on a website, CRM, and MLS.
Somehow, during the course of doing business, the two companies had a fall out and parted ways. Unfortunately for my friend, his company gave the real estate company administrative access to the domain name AND the hosting - both of which were owned by my friend's company, not the real estate company.
Since the companies had a fall out over money, the real estate company is now holding the domain and web hosting accounts hostage. They've changed the administrative access, password and everything!
As one friend of mine (familiar with the situation) said, You live you learn.
Let that be a lesson to everyone. If you bought your domain name from GoDaddy, Register.com, Enom or whomever, do not give up administrative rights! Even if you have no flipping clue about computers - take the time to learn this much.
Your web address is your "title" to your online address, your online real estate so to speak. You can change hosts, change real estate website providers and so on - but the minute you give up administrative access to your domain name, you can lose big!
Learn to buy/register your own domain name. Learn how to change the DNS nameservers. This will save you a ton of trouble, headaches, keep your health - and just overall be a lot easier for you.
I like GoDaddy because their customer service can really help you if you don't know what you're doing. There are others of course, so explore and compare.
No real estate website company or SEO should put you into some long-term plan that essentially holds your website hostage if you don't pay.
Good SEOs will do the work - and if you insist on not paying, they'll simply stop working for you; and let you leave if you want.
Good website companies will create the site for you and work with your existing domain and web host - not insist that you go with their hosting.
By the way, I've had too many SEO clients ask if they would have to switch hosting companies. That is always a NO! No SEO company should host client sites because whatever the SEO does, there is still some risk that engines may change compliance. If that changes, then other SEO clients would be under search engine compliance violation! That's too big of a risk!
Comments(4)