Website Portability When Using Sitebuilders

I will be the first to tell you using site builders online is the way to go. Access from any device to make changes, updates and manage sales. You don't have clunky software and files that reside on a master computer.

You can be at the office, home, on the road and still access and work on your website when needed.

Cloud based system have really taken over from the old method of using windows based programs to build and upload websites to servers.

There are content management systems specialized to almost every industry imaginable.

So before we know down cloud based sitebuilders lets look at the upside.

• Inexpensive

• Fast and User Friendly

• Easy to use

• Better Security

• Better Reliability

Cloud Based Sitebuilder are Inexpensive

Using an online sitebuilder will almost always cost less than building or having a website built from scratch. That is because the basic components are already provided. Programs like shopping carts come preinstalled and are generally fully supported.

So you don't have to hire anyone, pay anyone for help or even have anyone else involved.

This is the biggest cost saving factor as well as the fact that companies like pageBuzz have so many customers it keeps the cost low. As you work with smaller companies, (meaning less earnings) you end up paying a bigger chunk of their bills. So using existing platforms is really the cheapest option for anyone.

Cloud Based Sitebuilders are Fast and User Friendly

They are also very fast to develop pages and websites on. It can take as little as a few seconds to add pages which is a fraction of the time needed using conventional methods that require a webmaster having files based on their computer.

So the time to build a website is cut to hours rather than days. And the same is true in maintaining websites, it is just faster to access the online tools, make changes and save than to use remote files, that have to be formatted and upload to a webserver.

Cloud Based Sitebuilders are East to Use

To run a website using sitebuilders is so easy anyone can do it. You don't need a webmasters, designer or programmer. The tools are online, in the cloud. They are tailored to work with your website, so there are no bulky features that you don't need.

In traditional software like Dreamweaver you have everything and the kitchen sink. But you don't need everything for most websites. And learning everything is complicated, time consuming and hard.

Site builder on the other hand have tools that let you quickly replace images, or change the text on a page. Some sitebuilder are less flexible than say, pageBuzz, which uses wide open web page editors for any possible page design.

Nonetheless sitebuilders are much easier to use.

Cloud Based Sitebuilders Offer Better Security

Since users don't have the ability to upload programs on most sitebuilders they also don't have the ability to open security holes. In shared hosting, everyone on a server brings in a risk of creating a security hole.

Shared servers are commonly hacked, and used for spam, DDOS attacks and other things besides your website.

It is easy for other people hosted on the server to access your files and see what you are doing. There is really very little security on traditional hosting and more of it is just trusting your neighbors.

Cloud Based Sitebuilders are More Reliable

Due in part to the added level of security offered by sitebuilders, you have better reliability. Performance is handled by the host and not the individual users.

You are never asked to limit CPU time of programs or the number of page accesses you can have or the number of database connections. That makes it easier, but also more reliable.

Nobody likes to be in a Hotel and have the hot water run out because the other people used it all first. And nobody wants to be on a server where the other people are trusted to not use all of the resources.

Just basic stuff like uploading or installing programs that don't work can crash a server. That means any one person of the hundreds using your server can shut down everything with one mistake.

And people do download everything and install it. Anyone of those programs if not configured properly, could take out all the websites in one shot.

So by eliminating those risks, you have a more reliable website.

Sitebuilders like pageBuzz offer Redundancy

pageBuzz uses high availability servers and failover servers to make sure when a website is down there is a backup ready to go online.

This is one of the biggest features of sitebuilders. Everything is stored in the cloud, so they maintain backups, and can keep websites online longer, faster and more reliability.

At pageBuzz every website is stored in 3 places with additional weekly off site backups.

So if a webserver ever fails, there are still 2 more copies of the website on other servers and an off site backup less than 7 days old. Even if the datacenter were completely destroyed, you data would be recoverable. That is a level of security that is not offered with traditional hosting unless you do it yourself or pay someone to do it for you.

Now that we have touched on why sitebuilders are better, let talk about the down sides.

• Less control of content

• Poor Website Portability

There are some down sides to cloud based website builders. But most people will never realize it because they are not programmers or webmasters.

Less control of content & Inability to add custom programs

Sitebuilders are a set group of tools. That means in many cases, you can't use outside tools to perform any tasks. You can't add your own programs or write your own code. That is if you even know how.

For developers, sitebuilders are a handicap, but for the 99% of the population sitebuilders are the greatest tool since the invention of the Internet itself.

If you need to do that, the you use another hosting model, like shared servers and run the risks involved with that.

Poor Portability of Websites

Finally, the part we were all waiting for, the portability of website from sitebuilders. In most cases, there is none. If you switch from one sitebuilder to another you might have to start all over again and build your website from scratch.

In many cases, sitebuilders use dynamic content accessing databases to assemble pages and they pages can't just be zipped up and loaded in a new server using a different sitebuilder.

Each sitebuilder uses it's own programming and needs different components. So even if you save all of your pages with your web browser, they may not fit anyplace else without major modifications.

This is common with anything. For example, if you buy a new set of tires for your Honda and it breaks down, you want to save the new tires, but they don't fit on your Minivan. Not everything works on everything else.

Even standard shared hosting sites have portability issues, operation systems compatibility, module installations, programming paths and so on. So even though you can zip up a traditional website does not me you can move it to any host.

But with site builders it is much worse, because there is usually nothing to zip nothing to save.

You should be happy where you are, because moving may involve starting all over again.

But there should be some components that are portable, such as shopping cart data, images and other databases. Those can usually be exported and imported into new programs.

Most pages can be copied and saved and pasted pasted into page editors with the exception of the images which need to be re upped to the new server. But if you have a 20 page website with 2000 products, the only part that needs to be rebuilt is the 20 pages.

Someone that knows what they are doing should be able to copy over the content in less than a couple of hours. That might not be as efficient as zipping up pages and moving them, but it does get the job done.

What you always have to keep in mind is that you are likely using programs provided in the CMS. Let say, you use a shopping cart, you need a new cart at your new host. Or if you use a program to manage photos, you need a new program at your new host.

If you were on a shared account, you might have those files in your website, but with sitebuilders that are remotely hosted, so you don't get to take them with you.

You will most certainly sacrifice portability of websites by using cloud based sitebuilders. But look at all the benefits you get in exchange.

Do you really need clean portability? If you even move is a few hours to much to move the files?

Most people will gladly give up the easy portability of websites to get the amazing benefits that cloud based CMS Sitebuilders offer. That is why they are now the number one choice of business websites.