5 things your new web development company will say to get you switch from AppliedI hosting.

With close to 12 years under our belt of offering strictly windows web hosting services we’ve seen our fair share of web developers move customers to ‘their preferred hosting partner’ and although most often we’re the preferred hosting partner, sometimes we’re on the other side of that situation.  In fact, the #1 reason we’ll lose a customer is because the customer switched web developers and the new developer insisted on using a different hosting partner or platform.

Now occasionally it may make sense to switch hosting providers, but more often then not, it’s painful, expensive, risky and completely unnecessary.  Not to mention, usually the developer just wants to maintain more control over your website and this could become costly and painful if you ever decide to switch developers.  So I thought, I’d help you out when you’re in this situation and provide a few responses when this comes up.

So let’s pretend you just switched web development firms or have just hired a new hot-shot in-house web guru and the first thing out of their mouth is “We need to switch hosting providers” here’s a few scenarios

• Reason #1:  I have a great relationship with hosting company XYZ because I’ve been with them so long! 

  Response: That’s great but have you ever actually contacted Applied Innovations support? Did you know they’re available 24×7 365 via e-mail, live chat and telephone support and 9 times out of 10 the person you speak to is actually the person that’s going to resolve your issue for you? Not to mention, your time is certainly valuable to me and I want you dedicated to getting things done. With AppliedI support most customers never experience a hold time on support and those that do, wait less than 90 seconds. So because we both want you to be spending your time developing my site and not managing hosting issues, that’s why I want to stay with AppliedI.

• Reason #2:  Your new application needs to be hosted on Linux, Applied Innovations only offers Windows.

  Response #2:  What makes you think my application needs to be hosted on Linux? If it’s based on PHP & MySQL it will run fantastically on Windows. In recent years Microsoft and Zend have worked together to make PHP run as fast on Windows as it will on Linux. And if I stay with Applied Innovations, not only can I run PHP applications but I can run ASP.NET, ASP and use both MySQL and MS SQL for all of my applications.  I value that flexibility and you’ll benefit from a winder range of tools for the job so that’s why I want to stay with AppliedI.

• Reason #3:  I want to host your new site on my Dedicated Server and I’ll become your new hosting provider

  Note:  DANGER! Don’t fall for this one!  This is the #1 mistake many companies make. They move their hosting to the developer and then when they want to severe the relationship with their developer, they aren’t able to and are held hostage.

  Response #3: Thank you and I appreciate that you want to oversee (read control) all aspects of my website but I prefer to keep my hosting and development relationships separate.  I also prefer that we keep our production and development environments separated and with AppliedI I can do that, that’s why I want to stay with AppliedI.

• Reason #4:  I want your development and production environment to be identical so we should move your site to keep any problems from arising.

  Response #4:  All of the hosting account Applied Innovations offers include hosting for more than one website at no additional charge! We could easily setup staging.mydomain.com or even stagingdomain.com at no additional charge and accomplish this. So with the ability to host multiple websites for free and maintain separate websites for different needs, that’s why I want to stay with AppliedI.

• Reason #5: You need to be on more than just a shared hosting account, you need to move to my dedicated server where I can give you more resources for your site.

  Response #5:  With Applied Innovations I have the flexibility to move across 3 shared hosting plans each with additional memory and resource limits, a semi-dedicated shared hosting plan as well as several cloud server and dedicated server options.  Migration within the Applied Innovations family of services will not impact my business nearly as much moving hosting providers and I can rely on the experts at Applied Innovations to help us move quickly and without issue.  Not to mention that most often the change requires merely an application reset for the new changes to take place.  So I value the flexibility and choice of a wide range of service options and that’s why I prefer to host with AppliedI.

So those are the top 5 most common reasons we hear a web developer tell a website owner that they need to switch hosting providers when they switch development companies.  It’s really most commonly not necessary to switch hosting companies and if you’re unsure we’re always open to having a conference call with you, your new development company and one of our sales engineers to discuss your website plans and needs.   Now to be honest, on some rare occasions it may make sense to switch hosting companies and believe it or not, if that’s the case .. we’ll tell you!

Have you heard a different excuse? If so feel free to leave a comment