How EasyRedir can keep IT costs low with enterprise-level service.

Information technology costs aren’t easy to quantify when they’re considered over the lifetime of a product. Forecasting maintenance expenditures for your in-house software is a skill that comes with experience, but it can be hard to quantify less obvious costs like demands on your IT staff for housekeeping and reporting chores.

One of the most durable of those housekeeping chores is the ongoing task of maintaining URL redirects across your entire enterprise. Opting for EasyRedir’s redirection service, as opposed to creating a solution in-house, can help keep your costs down and preserve your existing IT resources.

Save the Initial Cost of Building Your Own

The most obvious cost of building your own in-house URL redirection solution is its impact on your IT resources. Internal information technology services face a number of constraints, from budget to staffing to computing resources, and an in-house solution touches on all of those. You’ll need to either allocate people from your existing team or contract with a third party, based on whether labor or budget is your greater concern. Project managers, systems administrators, QA testers and a number of additional staff will be required before your product is tested, proven and shown to be both stable and scalable.

You’ll also need to allocate enough server capacity to handle your current and future redirection needs, whether that be on physical servers or through your cloud provider. Either way, this is another cost.

A subtler factor is the business cost of broken links, if you’re handling them on an ad-hoc basis while you’re building out your long-term solution. Each 404 page represents a potential missed sale and an erosion of the SEO equity you’ve built up at that URL.

Ongoing Information Technology Costs for Software Maintenance

The initial cost of creating your in-house URL redirection solution is only part of your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the project. While maintenance for off-the-shelf software can be contracted with the vendor or a third party, providing some cost certainty and perhaps even the luxury of competitive bids, that’s not the case with a solution you’ve developed in-house.

Between corrective maintenance to remedy problems you’ve identified post-deployment, adapting the product so it continues to meet your enterprise’s needs, and making any improvements or enhancements suggested by your users, the product can be a long-term drain on your department’s resources. Over the lifetime of the product, it can well exceed the initial development cost.

Avoid Ongoing, Long-term Busy Work for IT Personnel

All organizations rely on their websites to convey information to their staff and customers, to reflect the best available information, to support numerous mission critical processes, and to maintain a reputation among customers for being reliable. Hence, the operational initiative to manage web pages and ensure each page is taking browsers to the right URL is of the highest priority at many firms. And, normally, that means more involvement from IT staff.

The redirects required to keep your URLs live in something approaching real time, and ensure that visitors are served the correct pages, require a significant degree of managing. In an ideal scenario this would not fall to the IT department: staff from the business or marketing teams would handle their own redirects. Unfortunately, sending non-technical staff to an AWS or Azure help page is not a practical option. Your choice is either to add the complexity of a user-friendly interface to what’s already a non-trivial product, or reconcile yourself to providing IT staff on an ongoing basis to handle redirections.

With EasyRedir, we provide an intuitive, user-friendly dashboard that’s used to create redirects. After a minimal degree of coaching from your IT personnel during the onboarding process, business and marketing teams will be able to handle URL redirects themselves, with their own non-technical staff.

Avoid Managing Your Own SSL Certificates

One specific form of redirection-related busy work that’s important enough to discuss separately is the management of Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates. These verify the identity and security of your pages, and maintaining them can become a massive headache.

Getting it right is important: if your SSL certificates become expired at any point, visitors to your site will be served a warning page telling them that it’s insecure. That’s not just a missed business opportunity, it has a direct impact on your reputation.

With EasyRedir, it’s easy to automate the management of SSL certificates as you redirect secure pages, or even consolidate or move entire domains and subdomains.

Minimize Use of IT Personnel for Report Generation

URL redirects aren’t simply a business necessity – though they are that – they’re also useful business intelligence in their own right. Tracking the point of origin for each redirection to a promotional page, for example, can tell your marketing team which of their initiatives is creating the largest yield relative to investment. Link analytics can also tell you which parts of your pages visitors are engaging with, and which they aren’t.

The issue is that your business and marketing teams will often need to call on IT staff to create reports or provide them with business analytics drawn from that redirection data. With EasyRedir, that won’t be an issue. Our user-friendly dashboard provides the tools your colleagues in other departments will need to generate their own reports quickly and easily, without turning to IT.

Fast, Streamlined Onboarding

EasyRedir’s streamlined, well-honed onboarding process – we’re currently handling billions of redirects for thousands of clients – is yet one more way we’ll help you keep your costs down. Migrating to our service is quick and straightforward, including the importation of your existing redirects.

Our process is designed specifically to offload demand from your IT team. Once the initial setup and migration is complete, your IT personnel will have little to no involvement in the day-to-day management of your URL redirects. Non-technical staff will be able to do that for themselves.

“Re-inventing the wheel” is a phrase that’s often used to denote a time-wasting exercise, but there are times when it makes sense to build your own. Typically those are scenarios in which a home-grown solution offers key advantages in a core function of your business. Absent that motivation, and especially when there’s a trustworthy off-the-shelf service that meets your needs simply and cost-effectively, there’s little reason to create your own solution from scratch.

EasyRedir began because we wanted exactly that kind of redirection service, and at the time it didn’t exist. So we built it, and refined it, and consider it to be the best service of its kind on the market. Try it today for free, and see for yourself how EasyRedir can help you keep your IT costs for URL redirection low and predictable.