Why running a website on your own is one of the worst mistakes you can make as a small business owner
For over 15 years, we have been a group of freelancers, consisting of designers, developers, and sysadmins, before joining forces as WpPods. But what brought us here?
After observing so many business owners suffer with a myriad of hosting issues, instead of focusing on their core business, we decided to offer our internal wordpress solution to the world as WpPods. Which stands for “WordPress Pods”. ( We later added digital marketing services to our offerings)
Now everyone has access to the same advantage we leveraged internally for over a decade. But first, I had to experience all the pain as a small business owner myself. Here are all the major mistakes I made, which are incredibly common for people trying to do it on their own.
Cheap Hosting
Yup, I fell for it too
It’s absolutely true what they say. You get what you pay for.
Seems everyone suffers through this path, as I did. You get sucked in by absurdly low prices and promises.
Then you find out, your website runs terribly, which causes a high percentage of people to simply leave.
It goes down for various reasons, and support is frustrating and worthless.
You end up stuck on the phone with some guy in a foreign country, reading from a script, that basically knows nothing.
Which means your clients are not happy, and constantly calling you with problems.
Just skim some of the recent reviews. You don’t have to look long.
Recent GoDaddy Reviews
Recent HostGator Reviews
Just skim some of the recent reviews. You don’t have to look long.
How do they get good reviews?
Companies use lucrative affiliate programs, that pay third parties when they bring in new customers.
The internet is full of professional affiliate marketers that make a living by raving about a company and earning $100,$200, or more for getting these hosting companies a new client.
For example:
I didn’t know all these reviews we’re written by people who get PAID when someone clicks on their affiliate link. No wonder they write raving reviews about them.
No Backups
Don't risk losing years of work
A client of mine had three websites hosted at BlueHost. One day they were all down. She called BlueHost and they said, “Sorry, due to a hardware failure, all of your files are gone.” Forever, irretrievable, gonzo, later, sayonara, oh, yeah, and sorry about that. Ouch.
Like most people, I assumed my website was safe with my hosting company. Not true.
Most hosting companies do not do backups by default.
Don’t make this assumption.
Your website may represent hundreds of hours of work, or more. Make sure it’s backed up every day!
No Maintenance
Just a matter of time before you get hacked
The majority of wordpress websites get hacked because busy people forget, or stop updating their software. Really REALLY embarrassing if your clients website is hacked.
Hackers eventually find flaws in older plugins and themes, and that’s how they eventually get into your site.
Be sure you update your wordpress core every week, and your plugins and themes daily, if you really don’t want to get hacked!
Most hacks occur from out of date plugins
– Wordfence hacked website survey (Image source: Wordfence)
No Security
Wait? I'm responsible???
Most hosting providers never bother to tell you, that you are responsible for your sites security.
Owners aware of this will typically install a bunch of security plugins, which can help sometimes.
However, they tend to be bloatware, and slow down the websites performance, which is critical to a great user experience.
WpPods has 8 levels of security, and slow WP security plugins are no longer necessary.
Why do hackers hack??
- Add spammy links for SEO boosting
- Hijack a site to add spam, porn, gambling, payday loan content, etc
- Steal sensitive information to sell
- Distribute malware to visitors
- User server resources for distributed attacks on other sites
- For fun, and to deface websites
No Monitoring
Oh boy - my client just told me my website is down!
Don’t get caught with your pants down. Be sure to install some kind of monitoring tool that checks your website every minute,
Better yet, set it up so it pages or texts your phone the instant your site goes down. Which is not uncommon with cheap hosting providers.
But for the ultimate solution, be sure a website monitor pages a sysadmin to immediately handle issues. WpPods offers this is an add on. We get alerted, instead of you getting embarrassed when a client calls you to tell you your website is down.
No SPAM Blocker
Unless you enjoy vi-agra comments all over your website
So you are excited about the new site you built a few weeks ago. You are pumping out great content and can’t wait for the feedback from all the readers.
One day you log into your site and you have comment notifications.
But the comments are links to p*orn sites, and there are THOUSANDS of them.
You spend the next serveral hours deleting thousands of SPAM comments. Frustrated, you turn off OPEN commenting and require approval of all comments.
The next day, you wake up to THOUSANDS of comments about pills, p*rn and other nonsense and have to spend time deleting them, while trying to avoid deleting real comments left by actual readers. What a mess.
No worries… you can add pro SPAM control to any WpPod.
