Why You Need To Control Everything You Can
Life is chaotic, and has a way of ruining your best plans. Whatever you do in life, there are countless unknown and untold variables that can affect what should be a plain-sailing experience.
This is bad for business, as you can imagine. When you’ve got work to do and bills to pay, the last thing you want is some unknown variable taking you out and making earning money impossible.
The solution to this is simple: Control everything. Now, you can’t control literally everything, but for every thing that you can’t control there are many variables you can control. You want to control as much as possible whenever you can help it.
Take a look at this guy.
This guy had an ecommerce store using Shopify. Shopify is a hosting platform for your ecommerce store. Essentially, you put in your credit card details, do all the cute things like name your store and upload your logo and selecting your products, and Shopify do the heavy lifting for you.
In short, they host all of your website data – and with it your customer list, order information and the like.
Uh-oh.
Now, I posted this to Twitter, and a couple of people added some stuff.
Firstly, we had the mysteriously named A who told us that this guy was probably doing something dodgy – hence he tripped up Shopify’s security protocols and got his account banned.
Secondly, long-term blog buddy James Holt added that a big problem the guy had was that he also used Shopify for his domain name vendor.
Let’s look at those in a bit of detail.
What About Your Website Is Yours?
Assuming you set up your own hosting and domain name, there are three major elements to your website:
- Your hosting (which you rent from a webhosting company in most cases)
- The domain name (as in JamieMcSloy.co.uk – the digital version of your address)
- The data on your site (i.e. the files, images and information you store)
Now, more complicated websites have more elements. Ecommerce stores potentially have customer data, but mostly use credit card providers (who you need an account with e.g. Paypal/Stripe) and social networks have all kinds of information on file about their users, but I don’t run a social network and that whole thing is beyond my paygrade.
My point is this:
You want control of your website. In the event that something goes wrong, you want to be able to restore your website.
If your webhost goes down, hopefully you have a backup of your data and can move hosts. This could happen, but wouldn’t be the end of the world.
If your web domain is taken, you want to be able to change name and repoint that to your hosting. This could happen, but wouldn’t be the end of the world.
If your site data is lost, you want to be able to have backups that you can reinstall elsewhere. This could happen, but wouldn’t be the end of the world.
All of those things require that you have two things:
- Access to and ownership of your data
- The ability to switch providers
If you have those things, the risk is spread and diversified amongst different providers. Now, you can do more – you can have your own server space or automate backups and encrypt those on a regular basis. You can even have a lot of your “website” hosted in different places.
Generally Though… Don’t Keep All Your Eggs In Someone Else’s Basket
The guy in the example above didn’t heed the above advice.
Shopify provided his domain name. They also hosted all his data. Finally, they provided him the platform and site software.
In his Terms and Conditions, he agreed to all of this. He also agreed to appoint the Shopify safety team his judge, jury and executioner.
But could he have done anything differently?
Let’s assume he had my advice to follow.
He gets a webhost. Let’s say Hostgator or Bluehost.
Then he buys a domain from Namecheap.
Finally, he decides to use WordPress and Woocommerce.
Now, he spends a few hours setting the whole thing up or paying someone else to do it.
What happens if someone takes exception to his website?
If Hostgator shut his hosting account, then he can move his site elsewhere.
If Namecheap cancel his domain name or suspend that, then he can point a new domain to his hosting account.
If WordPress and Woocommerce have a problem with his site then that’s their tough luck. Those things are installed on your server and you control them.
In a worst case scenario, all of those things could occur and you’d still be able to keep your business running.
That’s a lot better than one day waking up to find some unknown person you’ve never met and who knows nothing about your situation decided to shut you down for an arbitrary reason that they won’t even disclose to you.
But What If You Don’t Break The Rules?
The guy in the above example might have been selling crack cocaine on his Shopify store. Sure, he breaks the Terms and Conditions and thus should be burned at the stake or banned.
If you looked at the screenshots he left though, the support team said:
“We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone at any time.”
“Our decision is final.”
In other words, screw you and your livelihood. If Shopify want to remove your store, they can do it because they don’t like the sound of your surname.
You don’t need to break the rules according to the terms you agree to.
Even if this guy had been selling human slaves, he could have avoided this by controlling his own data and not giving control of everything to someone else.
Sure, if you’re selling crack cocaine and human beings, you’ll get caught and tried. Hopefully though, it’ll be by the rule of law and not some tech support guy somewhere.
Let’s Extend This Out
It just wouldn’t be a Friday night article without me going nutso on everyone just a little bit.
With cloud services and interconnectivity being the next explosive growth market, everyone is signing up wholesale to the idea of giving their personal possessions to the cloud or, in other words, over to the control of other people who they’ve never met.
Got a free email service? That data isn’t yours anymore.
Personal photos on the iCloud? Look forward to the Jennifer Lawrence Experience.
Run your own website? Is it your own?
Got a mailing list? If someone can lock you out of it, then it’s not fully yours.
Now, it’d be stupid of me to suggest that you give it all up and live in a cave with no electricity. But remember – there are countless variables and it’d be dumb for you to lose everything based on something you could have controlled.
Think about all the places where you give away control, and see if there aren’t better solutions.