Lert.info emails

[harm_less]

A friend who has a working life of involvement with large scale petro-chem project management was told years ago by an IT tech colleague that "if you on FB it will enable me to be inside your computer within an hour". Since that time FB has embedded itself into so many online activities and website accesses I suspect the situation has not improved, and is probably far more invasive. The amount of control that FB attempts to take over your online activities scares me basically and my trust levels in regard to their business model are very low.

Having suffered a DDoS attack on our website last year and so experienced being 'hacked' and the remedial action we were forced to undertake I'm not interested in potentially opening doors to another such invasion. We have a number of trade customers who derive substantial sales volumes from their FB and IG profiles, and then purchase from us their base materials for manufacturing. Benefitting from others' FB presence without our actually doing so ourselves is a win-win IMO.

Likewise I prefer self ownership of digital content such as website selling platforms and music content. As your IG experience proves, accessing online content via a SaaS provider puts you in a very vulnerable position if that provider misbehaves or suffers damage to their system. That's why we own our website design in full (rather than using Shopify) and I have in excess of 1,000 CDs ripped to HD (and rarely use Spotify). Similarly I can't imagine relinquishing ownership of our private car in favour of adopting a TaaS (Transport as a Service) lifestyle in the foreseeable future, especially in light of our rural location, but economic logic may well require a rethink of this position in the coming years. Time will tell.

I do agree with much of what you say, when stuff is out of your control you are literally in the poo when the shit hits the fan...  not mention the ongoing subscription costs

Another one I see reasonably frequently is businesses that let their web developers host their email (or worse the domain name) on behalf... That can be a major effort getting that back under control.

We were pressured to change over to Shopify when changing hosting provider a while back. The subscription cost of doing so was a rude shock (quite apart from the cost of virtually rebuilding our highly customised website) so the decision to move our existing website lock, stock and barrel was an easy one.

The analogy that came to mind was to sell a specialised company vehicle in favour of a hire car. And as it turned out our company vehicle is now a Polestar that has allowed us to economically cut our courier company out of significant neighbouring province deliveries of trade sized orders.