Don’t be Held to Random by your IT Provider
When we first start speaking to prospects and new customers, we ask them a number of questions. One of the questions we ask them is, are you backing up your systems? Hopefully, people say yes. Some people do say no and that is obviously a risk but hopefully those people who say yes also say,
“Yes, no problem, so-and-so is backing that up for us, we’re paying them to do that.”
We’ll get back to them with “Okay, no problem, can we see the back-up alert messages?
“Oh, we don’t get any of those,”
“Okay, no worries, do you know what you’re paying for? Are you getting any feedback that your back-up system? is actually working?”
And in a lot of cases, the answer is no. How do you know you’re getting what you’re paying for?If you’re not sure as to whether your back-ups are working properly, being backed up, are they being successful every night? If you’re concerned about any of that, just get in contact, we’ll come out, we’ll have a chat with you, we’ll make sure everything’s working okay
I suppose one of the things that we try to allude to here is the difference between management and control. So as a business, you should have control of the critical parts of your business. You wouldn’t give everybody the keys to your front door so same sort of thing; we say to people they should have control of their internet domains, web control panels, email control panels and so on and so forth. You as a business have control of those; it is our job, as your service provider, to manage those for you.
The Website Ransom
Let me give an example of a situation like this. As a business, when you transfer your domain for your website you wouldn’t expect to pay much. Depending whether there’s a .com or anything like that. You can nearly expect to pay somewhere between £10-20. And really all that’s for is actually the domain registration – not the actual admin fee for the transfer and the domain.
We worked with a customer recently who’d set up their website and their email with a, let’s say, “Not a very nice company.” They weren’t providing the service that they want, which is why we took them on as a customer in the end. We needed to move their email over to a different email host. When we asked them to transfer the domain over onto this new email host the original company wanted to charge them £100, just for transferring the domain!
It was fine working with a local trading company – they’d been contracted with a guy locally, I think he’d had a shop, he was doing PC repair and things like that and he’d started trying to expand and get some business customers. Perhaps business wasn’t going very well, so I think he had to get himself a job. The guys who are now are customers were saying that they were having to contact the guy by email he would work overnight, they’d come in the next day and perhaps what they wanted fixed had been fixed, perhaps it hadn’t.
Mostly it’d become quite a drawn out process to actually get the issue resolved. So they gave the chap lots of opportunity to sort himself out. He didn’t sort himself out, so in the end they came to us as a customer. So we then asked them to ask the chap for their details – their admin passwords and so on and so forth. He basically flatly refused to hand them over any information. Sadly in the end we pretty much had to rebuild their whole network. We had to rebuild their server. We had to rebuild all of their email and so on and so forth.
Why Do IT Providers Hold Businesses to Ransom?
It’s about control as opposed to management of your essential systems. Things like having your username and password for your email control panel. Having control of your internet domain and so on. It means that you are in control of those things so if your relationship falters with your service providers you have the control, they don’t have the control. They can’t then hold you to ransom. I don’t know if this is a problem with IT people or they don’t trust other people. They perhaps don’t think that people understand what’s going on. And they want to keep things close to their chest. And I don’t know whether that’s a trust issue or whether they actually do wanna hold people to ransom or tie people in to contracts and what have you, so.
If you’re in a situation like this at all, you need to get out, I can help you, just get in touch by email or phone:
Call +44 (0)1636 681110
Email me at enquiries@jalapeno.is
