The Importance of a Website

Let me get this bit out of the way first.  A website is far more important than Twitter.  A website contains a wealth of information about a writer (or at least, it should).

But here's the problem with websites.  If you have a shit host (as I currently do) then your website will go down more often than a Kings Cross prostitute.  And when do you know that your website's gone down?  Well, unless you're incredibly vain, and you check your website every couple of hours, you would have to wait for somebody to tell you.  But who's going to tell you?  After all, if your website is down, there is no way for anybody to email you.  Your email becomes non-working.  So while it's all very nice to have an email address such as shaun@shaunstafford.co.uk, if nobody can email me on it, what's the point?  The issue of a website being down is compounded further for an Indie writer because people will bang that URL into their browser, nothing will pop up, and they'll immediately think, "Fucking amateur."  And then they won't get to read anything about you or buy any more of your books.

I'm currently having diabolical issues with my hosting company.  The website just keeps going down, and I have to email the hosts and wait until they pull their finger out.  The latest outage, they fixed it so that the index page (or landing page) worked, but none of the others did.  I'd rather not waste time emailing the Internet hosts.  I shouldn't fucking have to.  They should be capable of doing their job.

I chose this particular company because they're based in the UK.  I guess it was just that "loyalty" thing.  But over the last few years, they've been particularly useless.  On one occasion the website was down for 2 weeks because they had some kind of server crash.  Now, things can go wrong.  That's obvious.  But 2 weeks to put it right?  How many people do this company employ?  I won't name them here, but they're a cheap company - the cheapest, even - and they're based in the UK.  I think once my hosting comes up for renewal, I'll migrate to another host.

Anyway, the importance of websites.  A website is like a glorified advert.  If a person googled "shaun stafford writer" my website would come up in the search.  It should be near the top.  This blog will also come up.  Twitter will be there too.  And all of those things should be right at the top.  But it's the website where most people will go for all of the information about me.  Now, I'm not saying my website - when it's actually working - is fantastic or high-tech, but it does everything a website is supposed to do.  And from there, people can visit this blog, and look at me on Twitter or Facebook.

A website is a useful tool when it comes to marketing your work.

But when the website is down, it just makes you, the writer, look like a tool.

Come on, UK-Cheapest, pull your fucking finger out.