Your Website and Domain are not the same thing
Most business owners buy their domain name and their website at the same time and think of them as one purchase but they are two separate services, they break in two different ways, and usually at the worst possible moment.
Think of it this way. Your domain name is your address. Your website is the building at that address. Behind both its a directory listing that tells the rest of the internet how to find you.
When your domain and website are split between a registrar you signed up with years ago and a web designer who has since moved on, you have little chance of recovering everything in the case of failure.
Your Domain: The Part Nobody Thinks About
Behind your domain name is a list of settings telling the internet where to send people. One entry points to your website. Others point to your email, and to whatever else runs under your name: a payment system, an online booking tool, or a phone service.
These records are always changing. A vendor adds an entry when you sign up for their service. A web designer replaces a few during a rebuild. Someone deletes one that looks unfamiliar. Every change is small and reasonable on its own. After a few years you have a list nobody fully understands, including entries still pointing at services you stopped paying for and companies you no longer work with.
We keep an archived copy of your settings every time we review your account. When something gets changed, we keep it recorded. If something gets deleted, we restore it from a copy we know was good instead of piecing it together from memory. We also know what each entry is there for, so that we can safely edit the records and keep your services running.
We also manage renewals and certificates. Most hosting providers renew domains automatically and issue the security certificate without anyone asking. We still confirm both are switched on and working at every review, because largely is not always, and a lapsed domain takes your website and email down together.
Your Website: Uptime above all
The most important thing for your website is that it stays online. On all of the websites we manage we keep a look out for any potential problems before they appear. Some of the work we do on your website includes:
- Keeping the site software and its add-ons current, and confirming those updates ran
- Regularly scanning the site for malicious code
- Daily backups
- Filtering spam out of your comments and contact forms
- Watching from the outside to confirm your site is actually up, not just taking the hosting company’s word for it
- Taking our own backup, stored separately, before we change anything on your site.
These are all important steps to make sure your website is healthy, and it stays online. We keep track so your website stays on, and when it goes down, we get an alert so we can get it back up as soon as possible.
Why it helps to have one company handle both
Rebuilding or moving a website means changing where your address points. When the same team already holds a copy of your settings and knows what each one does, that is routine. When it does not, a website change is one of the easiest ways to accidentally break something else that relied on the same list.
It runs the other way too. When your website goes down, the first question is whether the trouble is the website, the address, or the list in between. One company answers that in minutes. Three separate vendors can turn it into a week of everyone pointing at each other.
What this looks like for you
Nothing at all, and that’s the point!
Your site loads and stays current. Your email arrives. The other things quietly running under your domain keep running, including the ones you forgot were connected to it. And when something does need to change, there is a record of how it looked before.
If you don’t know who is managing your domain, or your website and domain are split across multiple vendors and you are not sure where to look, give us a call. Aeros IT Group will review your domain and website configuration, reduce your downtime, and make sure everything runs smoothly. Contact us at support@aerosgroup.com or call 616-997-8324 (TECH).