Aviongoo offers a website transfer service to move your website from a fraternal hosting service to an independent hosting service with optional assistance.
The pitch sounds great. Hey, we love you. Since you are a great customer of ours and we want to build an even better relationship, we'll host your website for you. We're in the same industry so we know lots about your needs. Can we get started today? Just send us the text and pictures and we'll get your website up today.
So, you say yes because you have better things to do to sell your aircraft. You do not want to take the time to build a website yourself. And, the templates looked like they will build a nice website for you. So you say YES.
Things go along fine and then one day you say, hey Joe I've sent you a few links that I don't see on my website yet. Joe says, yeah, I still have to get approval for those. But, the approval never comes.
You call again, hey Joe, I really want to have links to all the aircraft I sell. Right now I only have links to the pages on your listing service. I've got other planes listed on other listing service where it just does not make sense to list those on your website. I need those links.
Finally Joe says, I didn't get permission to add those links. Yes, I understand you own the domain name, yes I understand its your website, yes I understand its your reputation, but, . . . we are the hosting service. We are providing hosting to you for free. You should be greatful. Please do not ask again.
Well, you are certainly ticked off. But is it a wise decision to move your website elsewhere. Below, let's look at the Pros and Cons of moving your website away from the control of your listings vendor.
| Pros | Cons | |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | Control my own destiny | No more hand holding |
| 2. | Make changes on my schedule | I have to make changes myself |
| 3. | Strike deals with new partners - even if they are a competitive threat to my hosting service | Takes time to add new features |
| 4. | No ifs and or buts I own my own website | Sometimes I worry. But even if I discover I don't own my entire hosted website, at least its established. |
| 5. | No more pressure to keep buying into this vendors new sales pitches | Will I be missing out on major new features like this new Customer Relationship Management system? |
| 6. | My customer and prospect data is under my control | I'm fully responsible for protecting my own customer and prospect data. |
| 7. | I'll have my own Control Panel. If I need to make a change at 3:00AM to beat the competition, I can do it in my underwear. | Getting things done on my schedule can be too stressful. I can run it by Joe in the morning and he can run it by the graybeards and they can get it scheduled. The deal will still be there when they get around to it. |
| 8. | I can enter my own page titles, meta tags and matching page content for enhanced SEO page rank with search engines | Since my current vendor doesn't worry about these things for me, its probably not that important. The SEO game is way overrated. Search engines don't mean that much to my business. |
| 9. | I like W3C validated code, I can make it happen | Doing things unrelated directly to my business is just a waste of time. |
The Aviongoo recommendation is to host your own website with an independent hosting service. If you need additional expertise we will help select a hosting service, help with the transition and help with monthly technical questions. YOU will be responsible for all updates after your transition period is complete (usually a day or two). On the second day we will introduce you to the Control Panel on your selected hosting service if you are unfamiliar with control panels. Our monthly fee is generally $40 to $60 per month.
We have had success with several hosting services. As part of the Aviongoo service, if you are experiencing problems with a particular hosting service we will be happy to move you to a different service. Please contact us at sales
Perhaps it is best to keep private data in a controllable place - such as your own PC or corporate network.
If they aggregate data and create useful statistics would they even tell me they used my data? What is my liability if they slip up?
Of course I'm joking. This is not OK.
Of course this is suspect activity. The only question is, do they just not care to take good care of their customers or do they want to keep an advantage over the possibility that a higher ranking for their customers would lead to less business for themselves?
Actually, the only reason is I have too much to do. The jury is still out on the website ranking for validated pages. However, it shouldn't have taken them long to fix their templates.
