I was talking with my friend Stacey over dinner the other evening about her recent blog woes.  Stacey is the owner of www.blumegirl.com, a well known customized apparel company.  After some research, she decided to venture into blogging and social media for her company as a marketing tool and fun extension of the brand.  Knowing little about the social media space, Stacey engaged a company that made tech talk sound like a foreign language.  As she later came to learn, the company was charging her ridiculously inflated prices (e.g: hosting services should cost anywhere from $5.00 to $20.00 a month –not $100!).  Among many take aways, the most important thing she learned was this: make sure you are in charge of your destiny by keeping control of your domain name and hosting account!  As it turns out, when Stacey’s relationship with her tech consulting company dissolved, they took down her blog! Be certain you purchase and own the domain and that any developer you work with designs from within your server, rather than theirs, that way you retain ownership of important web assets (in this case, your blog!) and you can switch developers quickly if needed, without difficulty, loss of service, and overall drama.

As Stacey put it: “Drama is for the content of the blog– not for the infrastructure of building and hosting it!”

So remember to do your homework, hire slowly and fire fast. Thankfully, the Blume Blog is now in good trustworthy hands!