It’s important to understand what’s important, particularly when you use the services of others to perform some of your work. It’s simply too easy to give someone more control than they need, or more control than they deserve, and end up regretting it.
It’s actually surprisingly common to hear of businesses impacted because they gave excessive control over important aspects of their online presence to the wrong people. At best, this can result in lengthy and costly legal proceedings, and at worst, it can result in losing your domain and everything associated with it, including your web site and email address(es).
As I write this, the popular and important site Snopes.com is apparently in this situation. While I don’t know the specifics, I want to use it to highlight a series of important lessons we can learn about what’s important, why it’s important, and the most important thing of all.
Let’s look at how much control of our websites we give away at several levels: our content, content management system access, backups, email, hosting, DNS, and domain registration. Do you know who controls access to each of these crucial elements of your business and the ramifications of each?
Podcast: Download (Duration: 9:28 — 4.8MB)
