Over at GreenMellen, we don’t host websites. We help people choose hosting, and we take care of all of the technical work, but we want our clients to have ownership of their sites. We do this for their long-term benefit (owning your own stuff is a good thing), but recently I’ve noticed a great side benefit of doing this.
Because we don’t host sites, we have no financial incentive to ask clients to move. If we see a situation where a client should move to a different web hosting company to help with the performance of their site, our suggestions are generally accepted because we have nothing to gain financially from their move, which makes our recommendation much more trustworthy.
This is kind of like when Yogi would tell me not to get new tires. It’s a bit of a different angle, as he had financial incentive behind his decisions, but he did a good job of proving that his recommendations could be trusted, and I absolutely trusted what he had to say.
If you can often say “no”, it can help your “yes” gain more weight, but if you can clearly remove your financial incentives for suggestions that you provide, it makes your credibility even higher.
