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June 12, 2017June 9, 2017

Tips to Moving Your Law Website Away from FindLaw.com – Part One

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Are you moving your law website away from FindLaw.com due to high monthly payments; sometimes over $2,800? You are not the only law firm that is planning ahead to move out!

As a professional internet marketing consultant, I find it very hard to believe that a $2,800 a month charge is not “bringing home the bacon” in regards to leads. Although FindLaw.com may be the perfect place for some law firms, I have one firm I am working with right now that does not feel that way and has complained about the high costs and low lead numbers.

We are moving this firm away from FindLaw.com and here are some tips to consider if you are considering moving out as well.

Do not wait until the last minute.
FindLaw.com requires a 90 day notice that you are leaving. Don’t miss this deadline or you will be forced to renew another year. That’s what happened to our client. He was so aggravated, that he made a note on his calendar for the next year and contacted us to move.

When you decide to move get started on a new website.
Don’t wait to get started on a new site. You may need 90 days to get your new site up. Although FindLaw says that the site you paid for and “own” (minus all their scripting that makes it work and images that makes your site beautiful) is yours to move, I can tell you that the static site is nearly worthless and you may pay more to try to fix it than to simply start over.

Consider the static site they give you as a temporary “Band-Aid”
The static site we got has missing scripts, missing images, the code is one huge glob, not even readable, navigation elements are missing or in our client’s case weirdly commented out to not show in the source code. Consider this a site you can use only after significant cleanup for one to max. two years.

Push hard and early to get your static site sent to you.
We had to push the FindLaw rep to give us the static site 70 days out from stopping services to allow us time to try to fix anything we could. What we got I would call marginal. Don’t let them give you the static site a few days before you leave. Your webmaster will need a minimum of 30 days to work it over for it to work and look “good”.

Make sure to check back Wednesday for more on moving your site out of FindLaw.

May 31, 2017May 28, 2017

Why You Should NOT Host at GoDaddy – Part Two

Continued from Monday and again NO you should not host at GoDaddy!

As of today, my website www.mccordwebservices.com is no longer blacklisted at McAfee DNSBL, Spamhaus.org and CBL.AbuseAt.org. But I did have to do a manual request to remove my listing at CBL.AbuseAt.org..

Customer Service is Lacking

Here’s how simple it would have been for GoDaddy to keep a customer.

Offered a free dedicated IP for 30 days.
Offered to move me to a new server.
Immediately removed the offending site.

What to Do if You Host at GoDaddy

1. Move your site before renewal.
2. If you must stay buy a dedicated IP address.

Yes, I personally hate to move clients unless they have had a problem, but now GoDaddy gets two big black check marks in my book. I have had sites hacked from internal intrusions within the GoDaddy environment and now this issue with allowing one website in a shared hosting environment damage the online reputation and create email problems for everyone on that shared server.

What Am I Doing?

I am moving my website to Hostway. I have had my business site hosted at Hostway since 2001 and have never had a problem. With firewalls between sites on their shared servers, I do not expect ever to have this problem in the Hostway Shared Server environment.

Need help moving away from GoDaddy? I’d be glad to chat with you about moving your site out today.

May 29, 2017May 28, 2017

Why You Should NOT Host at GoDaddy – Part One

No, you should not host at GoDaddy. Consistent website and email access are too important and hosting at GoDaddy is not practical if you want to be in business 24/7.

Here’s What Happened to Me at GoDaddy

I have my play/test website www.mccordwebservices.com hosted at GoDaddy. My main website is hosted with Hostway and found at http://www.mccordweb.com. I got a notice from WordFence Premium that my website www.mccordwebservices.com was on the domain and email blacklist with Spamhaus.org, McAfee DNSBL, and CBL.Abuseat.org. These are important sites that Internet Service Providers (ISP) use to decide what sites and email to block. So that notification was labelled critical.

That means that if this had happened to be my main business website any email I would have sent out using my email tied to my domain would have been bounced and set as undeliverable. On top of that the reputation of my business would be tarnished from being blacklisted. As I am in the industry having my site compromised or the appearance of being compromised is even worse.

I called GoDaddy immediately upon receipt of the notification. I was told that no my site was not compromised (I knew that as I practice intense security), but that several accounts on my site’s GoDaddy shared server were compromised, hacked, and sending out spam and possibly malware. With additional research on my own, I found out that one of the offending websites in my shared hosting environment with the same IP block was MichaelClayton.org. (Please do not visit this site as you do not want to get malware.)

I asked GoDaddy what they were going to do about quickly resolving this issue. They said they had notified the offending site owner and that the owner needed to do a cleanup. There was no deadline or time frame shared with me.

I asked GoDaddy to move me to a new server and was told by Tech Support on 5/23 at 9:35 am Eastern Time that a move was not possible and that when I signed up for hosting with GoDaddy, I had agreed to their terms of being on a shared server- meaning I could run into this problem again or in the future.

I asked for a change to my IP address and was told I could buy a dedicated IP address for my site for $75 a year. I pointed out that I was not willing to pay for something to solve a technical issue that was GoDaddy’s job to fix and was told sorry that’s the final answer. I had to pay to solve their problem!

I asked to speak to the supervisor and was put on hold for 20 minutes (I clocked this). When the tech came back on the line, he told me all supervisors were busy and that nothing else would be done for me.

As of today, my website IP is no longer blacklisted! It took 7 days for this issue to be resolved and one listing I had to submit a manual request for removal.

As a professional webmaster who has a number of customers hosted at GoDaddy, I was furious with the response that I received.

Please check back on Wednesday for the rest of the story and my recommendations for hosting and what to do if you are hosted at GoDaddy.