Recently, I saw this shocking post on LinkedIn:

This poor business owner is staring at the abyss of having his $25m business destroyed in one big hit!

I do not have any more comments on this case. All I can say is that this is not the first time I heard horror stories about this particular Big Tech platform.

Lesson for business owners

There is a bigger lesson to learn from this horror story.

All Big Tech web-hosting platforms (e.g. Squarespace, Shopify, Wix, BigCommerce, etc) have Terms of Service (TOS) for their customers. They are well within their legal right to enforce their TOS. However, how they enforce their TOS can present an unacceptable risk to business owners. In this case, they shut down their customer’s website abruptly without warning. They also did NOT give specific information about the alleged infringement and were going to shut down his account in 7 days! Without any specific information, that business owner could not rectify any legal infringement that might possibly be committed.

The problem with Big Tech web hosting platforms is that the power imbalance is heavily tilted towards their favour. There is the same power imbalance with social media platforms. As I wrote in “Is your business a serf under social media’s feudalism?”

If a social media page is the primary online presence of your business, then you are working on rented land.

In the same way, if your website is hosted by a Big Tech platform, your business is also working on rented land.

What can you do?

First, you need to have a legal title to your web domain. When you register your domain through us, you own your domain legally.

Next, your web-hosting service must host your website using an open-source platform. A ‘self-hosted’ WordPress is a very good example of an open-source platform. When you host your website with us, we can install any open-source platform on your service. WordPress is the most popular one.

When you have legal title to your domain and have your website hosted on a ‘self-hosted’ open-source platform, you become the master of your own destiny. You can back up your entire website and download them onto your computer. Should the worst happen, you can always switch web-hosting provider and restore your entire website to it from your backups. Better still, if you host your website with us, we can help you set up automated regular backups of your entire website to your cloud storage provider (e.g. Google Drive, Amazon S3).

Having backups is your best insurance policy. If anything happens to your website, be it malicious hacking attacks, human error, or draconian TOS enforcement, you can always restore your website and its backend data, avoiding any major disruption to your business.

Conclusion

Your business cannot afford to be a serf to Big Tech. Be the master of your own destiny.

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