You May Be Paying For Services That You Don’t Need
In the past couple of weeks, we have received phone calls and have had eMail forwarded to us from clients asking about products or services that other vendors are pitching. It always make sense to have a trusted advisor assist you in these matters. If you view us as your trusted advisor in areas of websites and internet marketing, always reach out prior to renewing a service or making a new purchase.
One client asked us to review their Account information. We saw that they have been paying $119 per year for the last 6 years for a Website Builder that they weren’t using! We built their site using WordPress. We are trying to get at least the current year rebated. Often, a salesperson calls and suggests some critical product offering. In this case, it was for SSL encryption. It is important to add SSL encryption to your website. However, Siteground offers this for free, as opposed to GoDaddy’s cost of $69 annually. Why not take that $69 and direct it to a Facebook Boosted Post or Facebook Ad? It may produce enough leads to cover your internet marketing budget for the year!
Vendors like GoDaddy provide a number of services. Some are acceptable, but some of their other services don’t quite measure up the standards of the web developer community. If you are looking to purchase domain names, their service works well. Their email services appear to work well from what we hear from a few of our clients. For everything else, I’d look elsewhere.
We recently had a site on GoDaddy take over a minute to load. The site was throwing up 504 Gateway Timeout errors as well as 503 Service Unavailable errors due to capacity problems. We had screenshots of the errors, but Customer Support at GoDaddy insisted that there were no problems! ANGRY EMOJI HERE Unfortunately, if a client is not on one of our Monthly Care Plans, they are paying for our time to troubleshoot and direct GoDaddy to fix the problem. Sometimes, this can take hours. When the client receives the bill, they can be frustrated. This is understandable. These costs can easily exceed the costs of a Monthly Care Plan or the Annual Hosting at a Hosting Provider that is more responsive to their client, the Web Developer.
We are all busy trying to manage our jobs. Having to quickly make a decision on a technology product or service can lead to expensive mistakes or a purchase that you may regret later. If you get contacted by a website, hosting, internet marketing vendor, wait before responding. Send us any information that you have received. If it is a good deal that is going to help you accomplish your goals, we’ll help you proceed. If not, we will let you know and provide and explanation.