In the past (many moons ago), Yellow Pages, Yellow Book or HIBU have been a great way to advertise and promote your business to a large audience.
Then came the internet and it went to the web as yellow pages websites. However, over the past several years there has been a decline in these types of websites and for good reason due to the following disadvantages vs traditional web design firm or professional services:
Not Owning Your Website: This is probably one of the most important disadvantage of owning a yellow page website is that you are basically renting it from the yellow page company and do not actually own it.
In other words, you are paying a yearly rental to the yellow page company to host your website. To this regards you would lose your website if you dropped out of the program or don’t renew your contract.
Not Owning Your Domain Name: When registering your website (that WWW URL that distinguishes you from the rest) through a yellow page/HIBU company, you are essentially not the owner of your domain name .
Yellow page essentially owns the rights to that name, for minimum of a year. They say they will release it and transfer the ownership (generally for a price) after the contract is up but will do everything in their power to make sure you continually pay the expensive monthly fees for hosting and domain name.
They will also tell you how important it is to maintain your advertisement in the big thick yellow physical book that everyone tosses away, unless your in your 70’s, which is probably not the target audience you’re looking for.
And not only does transferring the ownership of the domain name cost money but they have the upper hand and it can possibly lead to legal issues if you no longer want your website with them.
Immensely Expensive Option: It is vital to note that by owning (renting) your website via yellow pages you have to pay an initial cost for creation and hosting along with paying a rather expensive yearly rental fee to stay in the program. The cheapest monthly options they have are still 70% higher than our monthly hosting fees.
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