Imagine this scenario:

A business owner (let’s call her Nicole) decides she needs to get an office. She doesn’t want to buy space (for budget reasons or whatever) so she decides to rent.

One of her employees, let’s call him Tom, happens to dabble in commercial real estate and has space to let. The office seems to fit all the criteria Nicole wants in an office: great location, affordable, good layout, already wired and ready to go. She signs the lease for 2 years to get a great rate on the monthly rent.

They make some changes to the office, make it look even better by bringing in a feng shui expert and work flow designer. They get new carpeting, install better lighting, and go to town on the signage for the lobby and outside the building.

Everything seems perfect until about 3 months later, when Tom starts showing up late to work. Nicole starts to notice that Tom’s work is becoming shoddy. She meets with him, shares her observations and Tom agrees he’s not been doing his best. He promises to improve.

For the next couple of weeks, it seems like everything is back to normal. But then, Tom starts slipping up again.

Nicole reaches the conclusion that she has to let Tom go. She fires him on a Thursday afternoon.

Tom seems to take the news in stride. As it turns out, he’s been moonlighting anyway at a different job that he’s more energized about. His lack of focus and attention to Nicole’s business was an obvious symptom of this. In fact, Tom’s been working for one of Nicole’s competitors.

What happens next probably won’t surprise you.

As she learns more of Tom’s work for her competitor, and realizes just how poor of a job he’s been doing for her, she gets increasingly more furious.

She can’t sleep at night, and every day it seems like she finds out some other way that Tom’s actions (or lack thereof) really cost her business.

The next Wednesday, she’s going through all the invoices, paying the bills, and running the numbers. One envelope gives her an instant migraine: it’s the monthly rent payment notice on the office.

She realizes she’s in month 5 of the 2 year lease. She can’t seem to shake the thought that even though that jerk Tom turned out to be a horrible employee, she still has to send him a substantial portion of her hard earned money each month for another year and a half.

Nicole tries to reach Tom to break the lease, but her calls go unanswered. Her emails and even a certified letter get terse replies that she’s obligated under the contract to keep paying the monthly bill.

She decides that every time she goes to that office, her attitude and energy are so negative that it’s affecting her work, her employees, and even how she deals with her clients. So Nicole looks for a new office. Even though she’ll have to pay twice the rent, a change of environment is in order.

She finds a new office and starts the arduous process of moving. But most of the improvements they made to the office can’t be removed.

Horrified, Nicole realizes that she’s going to have to start virtually from scratch with the new place. Months of her business, and thousands of dollars in workplace design and expenses have been flushed down the drain.

It takes another year for Nicole to generate the additional revenue to pay for this mistake. She barely survives the situation, coming close to shutting the doors forever several times.

Fortunately, this story is fictional, although I’m sure there are situations like this that happen.

So what’s the point of this story?

Obviously, you shouldn’t rent an office from an employee. Which I’m sure you already knew. And there’s a good chance you don’t really care because you work from home, right?

But this is exactly the same kind of mistake business owners are doing with their “online offices”, i.e., their websites.

I see this happen way too often, and I hope it won’t happen to you. I can guarantee you that at some point in your business, you will fire your webmaster. As a former webmaster myself, and now an internet marketing teacher and consultant, I don’t know a single person in business who hasn’t had to change their webmaster for whatever reason at least once.

And yet, most business owners who hire a webmaster are actually renting their virtual office from them. Sure, a webmaster is typically not an employee in the IRS terminology, but they do work for you. And the way webmasters make most of their money is by the monthly (or annual) web hosting bill they add on to their services.

Just like Nicole and Tom’s situation above, things usually start out working really well. But eventually, the customer load of the webmaster makes your site less and less a priority to them. When you get fed up enough, you will want to fire them and move to someone else who can give you more attention.

At that point, you’ll have a serious problem because you won’t be able to easily move your website to the new webmaster. In a worst case scenario, the webmaster you fire can change all the account settings, disable your website, and essentially shut down your business. And if you registered your domain name with them, you may never be able to get that unlocked and put in your name.

So how can you protect yourself from a scenario like this destroying all your efforts of building up your online business?

Control Your Own Hosting

First, control your own hosting instead of falling for the “convenience” of using your webmaster’s hosting. Many webmasters will try to convince you of letting them host your site, but you need to stand firm on this.

Plus, when you control your own hosting account, you’ll probably pay less than what they’re charging you, and if anything like the scenario above happens, you’re in control of the accounts. I recommend Hostgator if you’re going to have less than 3 websites or blogs, and ServInt Hosting if you are going to have more than 3 or you’ll be running complicated scripts on it. Both of these have excellent customer service.

Register Your Own Domains

Second, be sure to be the one that registers your own domains. You can use my domain registration service at Shylar.com for great prices (and it’s powered with the reliability of GoDaddy). Some webmasters will register domains under their company name instead of yours, or using privacy settings that essentially lock you out of the picture. If you ever want to take control of it, you’ll have a terrible time getting what you want because you will have lost any real points of leverage.

Set Up Separate Admin Access

Third, when you hire a webmaster or virtual assistant to help you with your website, give them a separate administrative level account that you can terminate if necessary. Don’t just give them your username and password to your accounts if you can avoid it. At the very least, create a new temporary password that you can change easily if something goes wrong.

Know Enough To Get By In A Pinch

Fourth, learn how to manage your own website. You don’t have to become an HTML junkie, or understand all the PHP, MySQL mumbo jumbo. That stuff you can get help with. But learn how to make changes to your site, to upload your own files, to set up your own email accounts, etc. You can learn how to do all this and more at my site, Discover cPanel. This way, if you do ever find yourself in-between webmasters or virtual assistants, or simply in a time crunch where they aren’t available, you’ll still be able to run your business.

You can also download a free report of mine, “7 Questions You Didn’t Know To Ask About Web Hosting”.

The bottom line is, having your websites locked up in the hands of your webmaster is just like renting an office from an employee. It’ll start out problem-free. But eventually, you’re more than likely going to have some serious headaches down the road.

Be in control of your website so you don’t throw time and money down the drain!

Bob Jenkins

p.s. Have a webmaster horror story to share? Feel free to comment below!

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