I had an email from a customer the other day, one who is hosted elsewhere and not with me, telling me that they were going to use a new marketing company and the new company insisted that the customer's site had to be on their servers to give them more control. Indeed.... but not in the way that the customer thought. In most cases a move isn't necessary.

You have to understand the web design business a little bit. Hosting is offered by most of us because it means we gain a little income that we don't actually have to put in strict hours for--most of the time, if you choose your hosting company well or have a top-notch server administrator in your own business, all you really have to do is collect the money from the customer each month and you're done. A little email supprt now and then is about all that's necessary. So it helps to bring in some income when business is slow, and allows you the time to do some of the nice things you want to give your customers for free. Well, some of us like giving away some of those freebies, anyway.

This means that competition tends to be somewhat fierce for hosting accounts, and thus you'll often be told that you "must" host with the company with whom you're doing business. This is true in some instances, when the company has its own CMS (Content Management System) on their own servers and it really is necessary to host with them. Or is it?

It all depends on what you need.

I've typically found that none of the content management systems that are used out there are very easy to learn. If you're a little technically oriented you can learn them and be very happy with them, but most of the time you're dealing with things like hacking attempts because of security issues (I had to help out with one of those just a couple of days ago), and a system that is very difficult for the average user to understand and get used to. And they have their limitations in other ways, too. You can't change layout from page to page without a lot of effort, and there are things you can't do easily that are helpful to be able to do. They can be wonderful, but they can also be a headache. I recommend Adobe's Contribute to my customers because it gives them maximum flexibility with working on their site, it's easy to use, and it has the support of a long-term company like Adobe. Plus they can use it on any of their sites if they have multiple sites, so it's a lot more usable than a CMS.

The other reason for a specific host might be a shopping cart system. This is one case where you really would have to host with the company in order to use their cart, but then again, what are your reasons for using that shopping cart? There are plenty out there that are reasonable in cost and can be installed on any server with the right components, and have the flexibility and customer support needed.

What it comes down to is that you do have a choice. Your hosting business, assuming you pay your bills on time, is a valuable commodity that companies like mine want. Ask for specific reasons why the company you're working with insists that you host with them. If they tell you it's so that they have more control over the site, what many of them really mean is that they want your web hosting money, and the control is not letting you move easily to another host if you are unhappy with them. Ask for specifics on what they plan to do that requires your site to be on their servers. Then check out that information with someone else who understands websites to see if they really do need to move your site. In most of the cases I've seen, it was completely unnecessary.

A good designer can work in many different hosting environments and on many different server setups. There are a few hosting companies I want nothing to do with—Yahoo is one of them—because they are so restrictive in what they will let you do that it's virutally impossible to do anything with sites hosted on them other than straight HTML. They will want you to upgrade your hosting account to get the additional functionality you need, and I've found that they are then more expensive than the hosting my own small company offers—GoDaddy is a good example for this. They offer lots of space and email addresses because it's a rare person who is going to use that much space... so it looks good, but it doens't do the customer any good. Sure, you have a database system available to you, but you can't run the scripts that need that database system, so what's the point? You have to upgrade to get the functionality.

What all this comes down to is that you should be choosing your hosting depending on what you really need, not what a salesperson tells you that you need. And since your hosting is valuable business, remember to see it that way and don't "sell out" to the first company you talk to.