Web Hosting Contracts- The Hidden Nightmare
At Social Media Systems, we deal a lot with various online projects that cover an entire range of requirements.
As online marketers, this puts us in a 3rd party vendor relation as many times we promote a site that we have not originally created. In many of these instances, we discover helpful, bright, and supportive design/hosting personnel. In other instances, we discover companies that have painful ways of destroying the relationship… by holding the mutual client hostage with their own information.
What we do for our clients is a very methodological series of repetitive steps and careful planning. When a client hires us to promote them online, one of our first steps is to offer expert SEO advice and recommendations. If they do not have a staff designer that understands our request, we often do the basic code work on a case by case basis.
To do that work….. we need access to the site. Many large “Real Estate Agent” website providers have detailed measures to prevent this.
Obviously- there are simple legal contracts to protect a client from misuse, or to allow them to understand the possible issues arising from allowing individuals from outside of the company accessing the site.
There are also some incredibly abusive contracts, which attempt to scare the client into the possible damages associated. Here are excerpts from such a contract we received yesterday:
(I removed the name of this Real Estate Agent website company for purposes of the article)
“When accessing the FTP server, users with access agree to adhere to valid XHTML Strict 1.0
standards with regard to the markup language used to construct the website. If this standard is broken it will cause the website to lose cross browser compatibility that will create a situation in which “hosting company” ,will have to repair the website; charges will accrue in an event such as this and the offending party will be liable for any and all costs associated with necessary corrections.”
“Prior to adding any programming scripts, (Java, PHP, ASP, etc.), to the site, any and all scripts must be sent to “hosting company”, for approval. Any scripts entered without the prior written consent of “hosting company”, will result in cancellation of the FTP connection and client service with “hosting company”, immediately. Client waves all rights to any refund in the case of such event.”
“If any problems are encountered on the hosted site, or any other problems or issues arising out of the FTP access occurs which requires action by “hosting company”, the client will be billed and agrees to pay the rate of $150.00 per hour with a 1 hour minimum for each occurrence.”
“Any and all activity, whether malicious or otherwise, not explicitly allowed by this agreement will result in the FTP site being stopped and may result in criminal and/or civil prosecution at the sole discretion of “hosting company”.”
There may be parts of those sections that seem reasonable to an extent, but in the wording “any and all costs” and things like pre-authorization in the form of written consent, or statements like “Client waves all rights to any refund in the case of such event” are all designed as legal threats.
If this contract had the best intentions of the client in mind, it would have a section for each party to assign passwords and usernames, and a timeframe the third party may be doing the work. That simple form would allow the hosting company to double-check daily back-ups on those days beforehand, and if needed restore the backup by moving a few files. Realizing your own site is a few digital files, there should be minimal work to restore the site (sometimes even an automatic “one button” solution by the hosting provider) that could have a reasonable $25 to $75 charge for the tech’s time.
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