By Mike Mahony
Many people outsource their technology needs to other countries. They do so because they think hiring a professional is too expensive. I want to explain to you in this article how you save money by hiring a professional. You will get to see how a real-life example would have resulted in the ability to save money had the client taken the right approach.
The Situation
The client needed to migrate an existing WordPress installation from a development environment to a production environment. They hired an offshore systems administrator to handle this thinking they would save money. The concept here is truly simple. The client’s team had built a WordPress site on their development domain. Thus, the site was listed as “sitename.developmentserverdomain.com” and needed to move to “reallifedomain.com” (obviously these domains are fictitious).
The Offshore Resource
What happened next is very typical of offshore resources. The guy charged for everything he did, including the time he spent waiting for files to upload. He also charged a large block of time for “changing the base URL of all links in all pages and posts.” That sounds like a huge undertaking, right? Well, in reality, all the offshore guy did was open the database in a text file, search for the development URL and replace it with the live URL. It probably took 20 seconds at most. This continued for many aspects of moving the site. For instance, he charged more than an hour to use FTP to copy some files. That’s right! This guy opened up FileZilla and began a transfer of all files to the live domain and charged for every minute it took for those files to upload. Why?
In the end, the offshore resource charged 16.5 hours and a total of $257 to complete this task. That probably doesn’t seem bad to you, but …read more
Source:: Medium
