Business owners are busy. If you own your own business, you know that. It can be easy to get swamped with all the details of running a business, especially all the details of creating and keeping your website up.
It makes sense to outsource website tasks like web design and website coding. Using a pro to do the work and saving your time for what you're good at can be a good business strategy.
Here's one thing you shouldn't outsource: Your domain registration and purchase of web hosting.
Leaving domain registration and web hosting purchase to others could cost you in the long run. Why?
A big concern is the registration of your domain. Your domain name is your web address, and what you need to understand is that whoever registers the domain is considered the owner. This means that design firms and website builders who do this on behalf of clients aren’t doing them any favors. It's your domain, and the ownership should be in your name, not your web designer's or web coder's name.
What if your web designer decides to move to Hawaii without alerting their clients? What if they give up the business entirely? What will you do if you need to contact them to make changes on your site, buy a SSL Certificate or other tasks that involve ownership of the domain in question?
You won’t be able to do it. You won’t even be able to login, even if you know where the hosting account is, and the proper usernames, passwords, etc. The web host will ask for all of this as a prelude for any help they provide you for this site, and if you can’t verify that you are indeed the owner, you are in trouble!
The bottom line here is to purchase your own URLs, and secure your own web hosting. Also make sure you’re not hosting at the same place you purchased your domain name. This makes matters less complicated if you decide to change hosts. Then you can give access as you need to, but at least you’re not stuck if people move on.
It's okay to get feedback on where to buy web hosting from your hired professionals, just you make the actual purchase. And it's a bad idea to host your website with the same person who built it. Don't give too much power to your website creator. If there's a business disagreement in the future, they could hold your website hostage.
Also, make sure you have rights to the look & feel of your website and the pages created. Don't let the web designer hold rights to your website that you've paid them to create.
Who and how you give access to your website is also important. Giving someone the log in to your website can be scary. Make sure that the people you allow to use the log ins and passwords are trustworthy, and that they are doing only what you need and have asked them to do. It’s not unheard of for people to sift through sensitive data on your site, and use it for purposes other than what you have intended.
It’s also a good idea to change passwords frequently if you have a number of people in your back office. You should do this periodically anyway, just as a general security precaution, as hackers are about!
