I like small and friendly. In fact I’ve always likes small and friendly whether it was companies I worked for, places I’ve lived in or whatever. Even in the internet I’ve tried to follow the same approach. Not for me the big super duper multi million selling gurus. I like my gurus successful and preferably local (well I call the whole of the UK local). Any regular readers of my blog will know that I’m a big fan of both John Thornhill and Lee McIntyre. They both have managed to keep that small personal feel to their businesses as they’ve become more and more successful.
When I was setting up my first autoresponder a few months ago for the same reasons as above I thought that I’d give Wizard Responder Pro a shot. It’s run by Randy and Pete, both friendly and helpful guys, and the price was pitched at about 25% less than the big boys. And you know what I was really pleased with the product and the service. If something I tried didn’t work either Pete or Randy would very quickly sort it out for me.
Two weeks ago I tried to log in and for some reason I couldn’t get in. Oh well I thought a temporary server issue I’ll try again tomorrow, it’s nothing urgent. Tomorrow came and went and still no better. It turns out that Randy and Pete have been royally shafted by hackers and their whole business, lists, sites have all gone and probably changed hands over a dozen times by now.
Let me say right now that I bear no grudge about what happened and am certainly not going to winge about poor me etc. I really feel for these two guys whose business has been ruined overnight but it did make me stop and think. What did I think about? Well, it rammed home to me that their are certain parts of your business that have to be watertight in terms of security. My list is very small but say it had been 5,000 or 10,000 strong. Where would I be now? I’d be thoroughly shafted as well.
Much as it pains me I’ve moved my autoresponder to Aweber. It’s big and shiny and more expensive but most importantly it’s safe! While I’ve no doubt there are other really good little autoresponder sites out there why take the risk.
Next I must go through all my other service providers and ask some searching questions about security and what happens to me if provider x or provider y goes down suddenly. It’s a real pain in the **** but I guess the maxim must be: a) Move all essential services to safe homes b) Try and leave non essential services with small and friendly companies.
I hate doing this as I believe that we should all help small companies grow as it encourages competition and innovation like nothing else can.
It goes against the grain but sometimes safety comes first.
