The Little Stuff Adds Up

The Little Stuff Adds Up

Once upon a time you could build a website in HTML and leave it there. People would come to visit and get information, and that’s all you expected. But the Web has evolved into a place where websites almost take on intelligent life. At least that’s how it feels to me as a web developer. Fully half my work time each day is spent on upgrades and security, checking each site to make sure it has the latest of whatever it needs and updating accordingly.

You can’t leave a website alone on the web anymore. It’s like having a baby. If you don’t take care of it regularly, there are hackers and scammers who will do it for you, and not in a way you would like. You have to spend time updating and maintaining a website, or hiring someone else to do it for you.

That’s why you have those cheap hosting deals out there, $2.95 a month, $4.95 a month. You get NOTHING but hosting there. No updates, no security, anything you need for your site you do it yourself. And if you don’t know how to do that stuff, you take a risk that your site won’t be there tomorrow as it is today. So when folks ask me why I charge more for hosting, I tell them it’s because there’s so much more than just a place to hold your website now.  I host your website on my server, a server I pay dearly for every month. If I let your site get out of date on security, I risk the likelihood that a hacker will find some outdated extension and exploit it to deface your site. Or worse, that they will crack into your site and through that get into MY server and damage ALL the sites I host. It’s a much bigger pond than it used to be.