When I was an office equipment technician and salesperson, I always told customers that they were better off having separate units for their offices.

I didn’t like the all-in-one units that were coming on the market.

My logic was that if your printer component failed, your incoming faxes and copier were also out of action.

If the scanner failed, your outgoing faxes and copier were out of action as well.

When you had three discreet units, one failing didn’t shut down the office or severely cripple it.

I feel the same about having a single company managing your hosting and domain name.

Any issues with one shuts down the other, and they’ll often hold you to ransom if you want to move your hosting or domain name registrar.

I was recently in talks with a person who has their domain name registered with Shopify.

They want to add a subdomain that points to a different host, but the Shopify people won’t allow that.

He can point it to another Shopify store or page but not another site.

He can’t even relocate his autoresponder service to any but a limited number of platforms.

No doubt they get a commission on his autoresponder fees in addition to the renewals for the domain name.

You never know when you might need to relocate any or all of your web assets, so you must retain control.

Regards,
Brent.

P.S.  The other thing you must retain control of is your links.

Whenever you put a link in a PDF, blog post, email, video comment, audio comment, or any other place you can put a link, you must have it set as a tracking link.

It doesn’t matter if you use the tracking data, but without that redirect, the link can go belly-up, and you cannot change where it goes.

The simplest method is a Javascript redirect, there’s no tracking with this, but it’s so simple a Google search will give you all the information you need.

The free Pretty Links plugin works great if you have a WordPress site and gives you a simple click count.

You could use bit.ly or one of the other link shorteners, but their tracking isn’t much better than Pretty Links.

You’ll get much better results with ClickerVolt, https://link.wm-tips.com/clickervolt, a WordPress plugin with excellent tracking for a free tool.

The best is ClickMagic, https://clickmagick.com/go/Burtm10, it is a paid service, but the data you can get and the tool’s flexibility is amazing.