We are happy for website clients to host their own website but normally its not cost effective to host it yourself if you only have a handful of websites especially when you realise that with us you can have your website hosted on a dedicated UK award winning Server that is backed up, updated regularly and maintained in a secure complex for a very reasonable cost to yourself. Below is a rare example what could happen if you decided (normally through bad advice) to host and manage your own website after it was build / promoted and hosted by ourselves.
[Website Owner] We would like to keep control of the domain ourselves. I’ve updated the name serves on the domain to the same ones used for our other websites. Please confirm these are correct?
Can you please activate the web hosting for this account and pull the old site across. Once you have done this, please update the website IPS tag to ENOM
[Website Company] We have updated the site onto the new domain, all contact forms, navigation updated and works fine. We are waiting for Google to complete the transfer process to the new site as soon as this completes I will update the IPS tag (hopefully wont me more than a few more days). Will email yourselves the day it happens to confirm the transfer will be going ahead and to warn you that your emails will be lost on the server and will need to be re-setup using the new setup details from your new host.
Please be aware, as previously advised, that your email accounts (using your current settings) will stop working once the transfer is completed
[Website Owner] Our new webmaster has informed me all web accounts are ok and sorted. Please be aware we have now passed all relevant information onto the new website design company in order for them to host both sites as we have been waiting too long and had to move forward with our project.
[Website Company] The IPS tag was updated for you earlier today and looks like its completed now. To transfer the domain correctly it was necessary to take this time as I said before we needed Google to register the transfer process to the new site and as soon as this was completed then the IPS tag will be updated (which was done for you earlier today). Are you now saying you no longer want us to host the domain as well?
Really confused by what you have done here and now I noticed that you have stripped our website design links from the website footer. I respectfully ask you to replace these links, as I previously explained these form part of your SEO and we have reciprocal links to your site.
Confused as to why you went via nominet to do the transfer (it looks like you done this on the same day we updated the tag) when I explained that the transfer process takes a few days to complete correctly and this has just been completed.
[Website Owner] All relevant information was passed onto the new Essex Website Designers such as my nominet details. I gave them the details in order for him to continue his work swiftly and get my new website up and running as this has taken longer than it should I’ve now decided for them to host the old site which they have a back up of so that future updates to both sites can be done efficiently.
What links of yours are needed to be put back on our our old site and how do they affect the SEO? We are grateful for you work over the past couple of years but have decided a new approach is needed in order for my business to grow.
[Website Designers] Your business partner said that the new domain would remain our responsibility so for it to be taken away after we so carefully transferred it (ensure efficient transfer of pagerank and code) seems strange. Its standard website practise to have the website designers link in the footer of the website but it appears ours have been removed from your site. These were removed in the last couple of days. If these are replaced then we shall replace the links to the site that we created to your site.
We are expert and creating and promoting websites so know SEO practises. Links are massively important and cant stress this enough for you. To demonstrate this out of over 900 clients only one before you has left us and removed our website links (their new website designers did it) the end result (due to the fact we were forced to remove his links) is that his ranking positions have been reduced and his visitor numbers and pagerank have been reduced (visitor numbers by 65%) Therefore we politely request you tell your website designer to put back the links they removed.
[Website Designers] We have just done our monday morning website stats check and have also found that it seems your new web company has removed the Google Analytics code and replaced it with another one on your website so you after we alerted you to the 6 months of falling visitor numbers, you will now never be able to compare your results against what the site has done in the past. This is a waste of valuable stats that will prevent you from seeing the benefit or the harm that is caused to your visitor numbers after your pending redesign.
A more cynical person could say that the removal of the code will absolve the new web company of any fault if the visitor numbers tumble as there will be no record of your previous website visitors going forward. I hope you appreciate my concern and hope to receive a reply to this and the email below.