If The WebDesign Agency is Hosting Your Website, Be Prepared For Unpleasant Surprise

If The WebDesign Agency is Hosting Your Website, Be Prepared For Unpleasant Surprise

Over the years, I fought many battles against my competitors, mostly because they do not want to let the client go away.

This is what usually happens. A client hires a webdesign agency to build a website. The agency does all the work and offers a hosting for the website that may come with a some sort of maintenance/SEO plan that is billed on a monthly basis.

In at least 60% of cases, clients will happily accept this offer so they don’t have to think about anything related to tech stuff.

And everything will be just fine until the moment when the client is no longer satisfied with the services provided by an agency or simply wants to redo the website, migrate it somewhere else etc..

No money, no backup

I have over 100 horror stories to tell, but one interesting case explains it all. The owner of an online shop contacted me to redo his website because it wasn’t working properly. In order to do the work, I needed a backup files so that I can quickly move the current content (pages, posts, products) to my server.

When my client got in touch with the webdesign agency and requested the hosting log in credentials, their answer was, no, we cannot provide the credentials or the backup files.

Always remember that the website is your property and no one has right to limit you access to files, database, images etc.. if you already payed for the website development, legally you own the website and all the content, period.

A few hours later, my client started arguing with the agency and shortly after I joined their conversation, but they were still refusing to hand over the backup files.

For 2 days we were going back and forth until they finally offered us a “solution”. And “solution” was to pay them for an another month of “hosting/maintenance”, an extra $500 because the backup process will take some of their time.

And technically, they could quickly backup the site within 2 minutes by using that neat feature in Cpanel, the backup wizard.

After a long discussion, my client decided to refuse their “generous” offer, so I had to rebuild an entire website within a few days.

The Real Solution

#1 In order to avoid all potential issues, never, ever allow the webdesign company, agency or a developer to purchase the domain name on your behalf. Don’t even talk about your website ideas before you purchase the domain. I recommend 2 domain registrars, GoDaddy.com and namecheap.com .

#2 When you hire someone to build you a website, the first thing you should do is to ask the developer/s what hosting they recommend. If they offer you their own hosting, say, no thank you and demand to host the website on a hosting account that you will purchase, not the web development company. You cannot go wrong with large hosting companies such as Hostgator, Kinsta, LiquidWeb etc.. With your own hosting account, you’ll have freedom to do what ever you want, to backup the website and if needed to quickly change the password so that no one except you can access the server.