Jul 2, 2010
Why you need to partner up
Most web companies host their client’s websites on their own dedicated servers, managed by one of their developers. We used to do the same until we realized that it only brings problems and you end up spending a lot of time on it, reducing your profit greatly. It may sound like a way to make easy money, in the beginning, but when you run into problems, your idea will bite you back.
At madewithlove we try to only do what we are specialized in, and outsource everything else to partner companies. We’ve built a long term relationship with those partners, most of whom become friends. We give them access to documentation in our internal wiki, they know how we work and what we require from their end.
This morning we ran into troubles with a high-level client. Luckily enough, we had our partner to hold our hand. You can read the story in the full article.
This morning a client mailed us saying that his domain was down. Since we received it before office hours we didn’t react immediately. Half an hour later they called me on my cellphone to bring the news. I was on my way to a meeting with another client so I couldn’t investigate the issue myself.
At the same time I had a second incoming call waiting. It was our hosting partner to tell me the client mailed them to check if the problem was at their side. Within minutes we tracked down what was going wrong and we where able to solve the issue in 26 minutes. The domain (which is managed by the client) was pointing to an outdated nameserver. iLibris, our hosting partner, called and mailed the client to explain which settings he had to change, and in the meantime I made a temporary fix.
So, the actual problem had nothing to do with us or iLibris, but with the company managing the domain names. Nevertheless, iLibris helped us in solving this problem.
Two hours later I had to call a British web hosting company to ask them how we could make a wildcard DNS record for all subdomains on a domain managed by them. They simply said “That’s not possible“, that reminded me of why we work with partners.
You can’t even begin to imagine how important it is to have good partners for everything. We partner up for concept, design, front-end, daemons, hosting, domains, seo or whatever is outside of our field of expertise. We do this for every project.
This ecosystem of companies around madewithove allows us to do what we love doing: web development.
