By Shaun Fawcett
2005-09-20

Is Your Web Site Held Hostage By Service Providers?

Do you use third-party services to track the links on your Web site? What about for processing your online credit card payments? If so, you are probably losing sales that you don't even know about. Sorry, but it's a fact.

Third-Party Services Defined.

Let me explain what I mean by "third-party" services. These are the "link tracking" type of services that one can purchase from various online companies. People use the special html link codes that these services provide to keep track of how visitors move around their Web sites. In return for a monthly fee, the user gets online access to a Web site that stores their link tracking information on a database, and gives them access to tracking statistics. This allows users to quickly and easily find out such things as which links visitors to their Web sites click on, and how often.

But, it's not just link tracking services I'm talking about here. Payment processing gateways is another type of third- party service that many of us are dependent upon.

These third-party services are great in theory, and when they're working well they're also great in practice. BUT there can be a definite downside to them. That downside is this. If that service company's servers or and/or network go down for any reason, you go down with them!