I’m sure everyone’s seen the internet meme of the tattoo ‘artist’ having a bash at tattooing a winged horse on someone’s back. You’ve not seen it? No problem, here it is just for you.
OK, so now you get the idea. This sets things up nicely for my impending rant.
A client recently decided to move their website from Engage Web to a cheaper hosting company. There’s nothing wrong with that, we don’t charge to move your website away from us and there are a lot of people offering web hosting cheaper than us.
Keep that meme in your mind now!
We gave the new web hosting company the access they needed to move the website, and we transferred the domain to the new registrar specified by their new hosting company. This was done by changing the IPS tag for the domain name to the one used by their new registrar. This may sound a bit techy, but it simply means it releases the domain to a different registrar so it’s now controlled by them.
Anyhow, three weeks passed by and the website still hadn’t been moved. We contacted the client, and their new hosting company, to remind them that their current hosting would expire over the weekend and the website would need to be moved as the data would be removed from our server on Monday morning.
This was quickly followed by an email from their new hosting company – an email that did not copy in the client. They asked if we could change the IPS tag on the domain name to something else, something different to the one they’d asked for three weeks previously.
It’s at this point I’m going to stop calling them a hosting company, and instead refer to them as ‘some bloke who’ll do it cheaper’.
I replied to some bloke who’ll do it cheaper and explained to him that, actually, we can’t change the IPTS tag on the domain as he’s requested as we no longer have access to do so. We released the domain to the registrar he asked for three weeks earlier. It is no longer with us.
You can probably guess what happened next.
The weekend came and went, and the website’s files were removed from our server on Monday morning. The site had not been moved by some bloke who’ll do it cheaper, so the website went down. Not only had it not been moved, but he hadn’t even accessed the website to download the files and database. No, instead he emailed us on the Monday and asked if we still had a copy of the website, as he didn’t have one.
Once again, he didn’t copy in the client.
I replied to let him know that we could restore a backup from the server, but we would have to charge for this as the hosting had expired, and would mean setting the hosting account back up in order to restore the backup, before giving him access once again.
He didn’t reply. The client’s website has not been restored. The bloke who’ll do it cheaper has, instead, put up a blank WordPress website for them.
There is always someone willing to do something cheaper, but you really should steer clear of them because there’s often a very good reason why they’re cheaper. It’s usually because they have no idea what they’re doing.
Incidentally this bloke who’s willing to do it cheaper has a website of his own. He doesn’t advertise himself as a web designer or developer, instead he classes himself as ‘IT’. Someone in IT who doesn’t know how a domain transfer works, or how to backup data before a hosting account is deleted? I certainly won’t be recommending him to any clients.
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