Black Pearls: Controlling your own destiny in your hi-tech real estate practice: Three simple rules for dealing with technology vendors

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[This post came up yesterday in a discussion at Unchained, and I’m kicking it back to the top of the blog because the issue of data portability is so important for people who might be coming anew into the world of Web 2.0/Social Media Marketing. –GSS]

 
Would it surprise you to learn that host, hostage and hostility are cognate terms? They come to us by way of French and German, but that hos idea in Latin trips lightly from guest to stranger to foreigner to enemy.

I happen to be thinking of these English words — host, hostage and hostility — because I wanted to come up with a very simple rule for dealing with technology vendors. Alas, I think the best I can do is three simple rules:

1. Avoid hosted software systems
2. Avoid proprietary technology
3. Pursue commodity solutions — and prices

I bought and populated two new domains tonight. We buy all our domains from Godaddy.com — a commodity vendor — to simplify management and renewals. I control all of our hosting through a semi-dedicated server at HostGator.com, which means that I pay nothing extra to propagate a new domain. I have to pay for the domain registration, but I pay no additional charges beyond our regular flat monthly fee for hosting as many domains as I want.

I’m at the far right edge of the Realtor geek curve — as of tonight, we control 79 domains — but, with one exception, we control all of our data, with no need to fear the vicissitudes of vendors. (What’s the exception? Our virtual tours are hosted through VisualTour Obeo.com, which seems to us to be less odious than the other odious virtual tour vendors.)

Why does this matter? If you don’t control your own data, you don’t control your business. You are at the mercy of the vendors who do control your data. If you lose faith in them — or if they look like they might fail the test of the marketplace — you may find out much too late that applying my three rules would have made good sense.

So: Let’s go through them again in detail:

1. Avoid hosted software systems
   For dedicated web site vendors, dedicated weblog vendors, dedicated virtual or video tour vendors, dedicated customer relationship management vendors, the money is in the blades — the monthly hosting fees — not the razor, the ostensible product. The initial outlay might be steep enough, but the gravy comes from taking money from you month after month for “services” for which the added incremental costs are almost nothing. Okayfine. Everybody’s gotta eat. The trouble with hosted software systems is not the pricing but, rather, who owns the data and what happens to it when you elect to take your business elsewhere. Is your data yours to take with you? Worse, is your confidential information truly confidential? If you do switch vendors, will your contact database, for example, find its way onto the spam market? Can you be sure that it won’t? The vendors in BloodhoundBlog’s audience will surely squeal that their integrity is being unfairly impugned. That’s fine. With what third parties do they share their confidential, proprietary information? Catch a clue: Do as they do and not as they say.
2. Avoid proprietary technology
   Here’s the cute part about dealing with hosted software systems: They’re almost always built on proprietary software tools. Even if you can take your data with you at the door, you can’t take that software that you have paid for, month after month. Welcome to Ground Zero, where you get to start all over again. I am not arguing against intellectual property rights — far from it. But if you have paid for software, your right to use that software should not end with your relationship with the software vendor. If you have hardware that will still run Lotus 1-2-3, you have every right to see your P&L statement in glowing green digits. Ideally, any tools you use on hosted systems should be open source. Failing that, you should have a full-boat license to the functionality, not a license that is rent-based or contingent upon your continued commerce with the licensor.
3. Pursue commodity solutions — and prices
   And thus we come to god’s gift to rational internet commerce, the Apache web server. If your net-based software systems are all built with standard Apache web server open source tools — like Perl, PHP, Ruby, MySQL and WordPress — your data is free from the bonds of avaricious vendors. Moving a decent sized real estate practice from one Apache server to another is not a task to be undertaken lightly. But it can be undertaken, with no loss of either your data or your software functionality. Moreover, because you are using commodity tools, your monthly hosting charges will reflect commodity prices. We pay less per month for all of our hosting — dozens of domains — than you will pay for one vendor-hosted web site.

And that’s all easy to say. But the horse is already out of the barn, isn’t it? You’re already being held hostage by hostile hosting vendors. What should you do now?

First, observe these rules in all of your future vendor relationships. Work only with vendors who will let you host your own data and own your own software on your own Apache web server — or an equivalent server technology that gives you a level of mobility you’re comfortable with.

Second, put your existing vendors on notice that you want them moving toward this ideal of host-independence with no take-it-or-leave-it software licenses.

Third, if you have to break away from a hostile host who holds your data or software hostage — grin and bear it — but learn your lesson. Your data is your business. If you don’t control it, your life belongs to the vendor who does control your information.

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