In my article about website ownership, I talked about how your website is similair to your physical store front… there are parts you own and parts you rent. In continuing with that analogy, in this article we’re going to talk about website maintenance.

Like your physical store, your website needs up keeping. Who get to take care of that maintenance? If you rent your building, it typically falls on your landlord. If you own the building, you get fix it yourself or hire someone to do it. It works the same way with your website. Although, as mentioned in the ownership article, you technically own your website, we’re going to think of this in the same terms of renting and owning.

If you rent your website, you pay a monthly fee to your web designer/agency to handle the maintenance of your site… the hosting, software updates, license up keep, back ups and if something breaks they fix it. On the flip side, if you decide to maintain your site yourself, well that’s similar to owning your building. You handle all those things mentioned above. If something breaks, it falls on you to fix it or hire someone to fix it for you.

So is it better to own or rent, have your site maintained or maintain it yourself? Well that is one question I can’t answer for you. I can only give you the information to help you make that decision. While it can be cheaper in the long run to handle maintenance of your building and your website yourself, these are things that can take you away from doing the things in your business that make you money. Yes, you website does make you money but working on it doesn’t so much.