Know where your website is hosted
How “in control” do you feel about your current website? Is it regularly backed up? If the website disappears tomorrow, can you quickly and easily get it back?
Your web “host” is the company that stores all your website’s files and content, including images etc. You must make sure you know who to contact if anything happens.
Have a backup plan
We sincerely hope you’ve never experienced the pain and expense of losing your website and all its content, but it does unfortunately happen.
Make sure this never happens to you by having a good backup plan. Some web hosting companies can do this for you. Some developers and agencies offer a website care plan that do this for you. Or you can do it yourself.
Choose whichever option suits you, but make sure that it’s done!
Make sure your hosting doesn’t expire
We’re all human and we forget things. Unfortunately we have stories where people have forgotten to renew their hosting and they’ve lost all their content as a result. Sometimes they were lucky and the hosting company had kept a backup just in case. But don’t take the risk!
Make sure you know when your renewal date is. Good hosting companies will send you a reminder email when it’s coming up, but emails can get lost in spam folders and credit cards can expire…
Where is your domain name registered?
Your domain name, e.g. google.com is the address people use to find you online. It must be registered with a domain registrar which is usually renewed annually, but it can be for longer periods if required.
Don’t let your domain name expire either! If it’s an in demand name, you could lose it to someone else which would be nothing short of a disaster.
So know where your domain name is registered, and make sure you know who to contact.
If you have the option, make sure you enable “auto renewal”. But keep tabs on it, as credit cards can expire and you may have missed the reminder email.
Why it’s best to have your own website
In today’s climate where social media companies are coming under fire, who actually owns your content? You should check the terms and conditions, because some platforms reserve the right to terminate your agreement without warning. That could be a lot of content to lose.
This is why we recommend your own website where you get to keep your content firmly under your control. If you want to move to a different hosting company, you can freely do so. If you want to migrate the content over to a different platform, that’s possible too.
A good platform choice is WordPress. It’s also an open platform which means that it’s free for anyone to download and use. Of course, there are costs involved in building the website, writing the content and hosting it just as there are with any platform.