This is a normal or routine practice for website design companies and website owners where they renew their hosting on a yearly or bi-yearly basis that normally covers their Domain, Website, Email and SSL certificate, here is an example of a renewal that didn’t go very smoothly but highlights the need not to rely on email for workflow and to use a 3rd party system to allocate work / tasks within a company. It also demonstrates the limitations of some ‘website designers’ that you could use that don’t have any idea about website usability and SEO. It’s no good having a good looking website if it doesn’t convert website visitors to clients and doesn’t attract the correct website visitor.
As you will read the website designer gives a very negative picture of what could happen to your website in the worst scenario if your site gets hacked / compromised, so would agree its very worth the small domain / hosting renewal cost to ensure a professional takes ownership of any problems you may have. It also shows how badly a website can be it its not updated / supported which could leave it insecure and vulnerable to hacking / malicious actions.
[Website Designers] Since I have not heard from you regarding your renewal, or received payment I have got an extension for your domain, hosting and email until Friday as I do not want your business to be negatively affected, I won’t be able to get another extension, so please get in touch as we haven’t had any answer to our calls, posted invoice, emails, text or social media message.
If you are going to stay with us or move to and website designers / hosting company I suggest you get it sorted tomorrow otherwise you will possibly lose your emails and website. If you have someone else ready to take over have them contact me tomorrow asap so I can provide them the details so you do not lose access to your emails and your website goes offline which could affect your Google ranking / SEO.
Just a gentle reminder that your hosting and emails expire midnight Wednesday and I have not heard back from you regarding the attached invoice.
[Website Owner] To be honest we was looking at other options for hosting as We struggle with only having limited storage on the emails and the Google rating is not good we don’t come up in any searches we wanted. What can be done to sort these issues out. What do you know about the website updates, we notice there is a lot of them, can we update this?
[Website Designers] That’s fine, you need to get that sorted today really, tomorrow would be pushing it otherwise your new guys won’t be able to transfer the website or emails because they will be gone. Let me know who they are and I’ll provide them with what they need.
With regards to email, if you set up as per instructions provided previously you would not have any issues. It is not me who set the size limit, intact I actually got it doubled for you last year free of charge after I had words with the hosting company. However as said before you should not be using email as your primary CMS system, and relying on just the server. If the hosting company loses the server, you will lose all your emails, this goes for any email provider, there is no 100% guarantee, no one can ever give that, this is why I explained that you need to back up locally and how, so you skip the storage limits and the emails will be backed up in your normal office back up procedure.
If you archive them locally you will have no storage limits on your email accounts if you have set up your email accounts correctly, the emails will move from the server to the local file. If this is not happening, you have not set the account up correctly and set server delete flag in the account settings, if this is the case you need to speak to your IT admin who can set up the accounts correctly so you don’t have the issues.
Every email provider has storage limits, I don’t know any provider who does not. This is why you archive locally if emails you have are so important, but in reality you should have a CMS to manage your customer interaction, it’s a lot better, easier to use, you can hold more data on them and you attach the emails to them. We use one, happy to give information, it holds all our work flow / customer details and interactions, after you use it you will see that relying on email for this important function is very limiting and seems pretty old-fashioned now.
Regarding your email services it seems you want exchange account features and access for free. With my instructions you can get close without any additional costs, if you want exchange email as I said before you can purchase Microsoft exchange accounts however these are £10 per email account per month. So for you and 18 email addresses it’s £180 / month just for email, which you don’t need if you set up the accounts correctly. We do not make any money on exchange accounts, these are provided at cost from the hosting company.
Google Ranking is par of SEO, which is not included in what I provide, I am sure your IT Support person has a really good guy who’s a lot better than me to do SEO work, but again that will cost you, but you get what you pay for, this guy has boosted site ranking really well.
We are not really concerned if you stay or go, I barely make any money from what we charge you. But if you are going, you have to get everything moved tomorrow afternoon at the latest, so website, email accounts, have all your computers updated with the new email settings etc etc so you do not experience any down time. I’ve got you this extension, I doubt the hosting company will extend it again. Let me know asap the new guys details so we can get the ball.
The website updates are all recent ones and we will update them all for you today, please dont update anything going forward yourself as you could stop your website working (unlikely but possible).
[Website Owners] I can’t be bothered to move it all but what is the difference with you and the hosts like 1&1 and Go Daddy and all the other sort of website hosts, as they seem so much cheaper than yourselves. Surely they don’t offer the same service.
[Website Designers] Sure you could move to 1&1 or GoDaddy etc but they only provide hosting. Who is going to move the site and emails? Set it up and manage the site for you. Who is going to fix problems when it arises? GoDaddy offer the exact email as you have now, still with size limits which you will again max out unless you archive as I have previously told you to.
A small part of the price you are paying is hosting (in fact it is the lowest cost on the invoice), what you get from Godaddy but a different provider. That is exactly the same. However what I charge is not just hosting, it is a managed service. Everyday I go on your site, sometimes twice, make sure that all the security patches for the site are installed correctly and quickly and that the site is still working properly. I make sure the backups have run and stored offsite. So if there is a problem with a update I can quickly restore the site so there is minimal downtime. If the site gets hacked, the tools I have in place (that are paid for and is part of the price) notify me immediately so I can pull down the site and restore it to a previous point before Google detects that the site has been hacked and black lists your site and emails, effectively killing your business. I have other setups that allow the site to be faster so it improves your Google rankings and that if the server stops if the hosting company has issues the site stays online with a cached backup, and I get notified 24/7 of any issues so I can instantly go to work and fix so you do not have to. I deal with all the technical issues and use my near 15 years of experience to run your site without you having to bother with anything.
Sure you can just buy hosting, pay someone to move the site and emails (which will probably cost you around £525 to do) and then pay the low monthly cost just for the hosting and still have the same email issues if you do not set up your email accounts correctly on your local machines. But you then run the risk of the site being hacked because no one is applying the patches, run the risk of your site being black-listed because of that, and then have to pay someone thousands to rebuild your website because you have no backups and even more money for someone to do damage control getting your site de-ranked which is honestly a massive pain, a ton of work over a course of months even years (its actually more cost effective and easier to kill your old domain and create a new one with new branding etc and lose all the traffic from your old domain). You will lose customers who go to your site and get a massive red warning who will never trust your site or business again.
You get what you pay for, and you get my service at a massive discount because your IT Support person quoted you a lot less than what I would normally charge and I have not raised my prices because this is not my main job and not how I make my money, I make less than half minimum wage on managing your site. At the end of the day, I will always advice you honesty because of that.
It is your business and you run it as you see fit, you pay someone now to move your site to just hosting and then next year you will start seeing the savings from just paying the hosting but you then have figure out all the technical stuff yourselves and take all the risks or you pay someone (like me) to do all that stuff for you.
[Website Owners] I don’t know anything about it so that’s why I asked, just trying to save money but what I did not know is what you do and what we would get from just hosting
[Website Owners] I’m happy to answer questions about the website, that’s what I’m here for. Though saying that I am not your IT admin, anything in your office is out of my control, I just deal with the website and make sure that stays online and working without you guys needing to worry about it, I take care of all the technical stuff and go all nerdy when things go wrong. Give me a shout tomorrow when it’s paid so I can then action the payments I have to make. For your reference this is what you need to do with your emails
All emails from the form go to hello@ email account which is setup correctly. The issue is that you have run out of space on the mailbox (set at 2GB Max). You need to delete to create some space for new emails to arrive. You are also close to the limits on the rest of the inbox.
I would suggest deleting anything you no longer need and anything you wish to keep move it to a local backup as per your email client you are using, for example if you are using outlook you create a local PST file where all the emails are saved locally, especially any with large email attachments, I doubt you need instant access to legacy email, having the archive file stored on your network will give everyone access as well as freeing up space on the webserver. Your IT admin should be able to assist with this as it is not a website issue.
Email Problems
Can you give me more information on the issue, like is it only one computer or all of them, do you get errors? (if so, what are they as they would help me understand the issue) do you get kick backs emails? (if so forward them to me so I have an idea what the issue is) Are you using the correct credentials? Does the same thing happen when you log into the webmail client and you get the same errors from there? Screen shots of errors would be a great help or even just writing them down in a email, something for me to go on so I can get to the bottom of it for you.
Have you changed something recently? As nothing has changed my end, as I assume hello@ email account as been working this past year? There is nothing wrong on the server side (if it was all your emails would not be working as they are all on the same server). So please send me some more information and I will look into it further.
I’ve resubmitted your website to the search engines again, however I talked to your IS support analyst last night and he will be in contact with you about this
Website Ranking Problems
We are having an issue with our website, we are not showing on Google at all from any search with the exception of typing the actual company name and then there is an error with the link (I have attached a screen shot of the message that appears on google which says “A description for this result is not available because of this site’s robots.text”:
Also, we have been contacted to say:
“I noticed your website is indexed in google as https which isn’t working, I think it needs to be set up as 302 redirect to the http url, either that or sort the SSL certificates out to get it working in https, either way its quite a simple process to fix.” Please could you organise for this to be done as soon as possible.
In addition, when searching the area under our address our business is not showing, I have attached another screen shot, you can see that our competitor’s businesses are showing as well as other businesses, however, we are not showing on there, please could you organise for this to be added
