Web Hosting for Financial Advisors

Your website is a record, not a brochure

A restaurant changes a price on its menu page and nobody has to prove what the price used to be. An advisory firm changes a sentence about how it invests, and the previous sentence still matters. Under the advertising and recordkeeping expectations that apply to registered firms, communications you put in front of the public are generally treated as records that have to be retained and produced on request. Your compliance consultant or securities counsel will tell you exactly which categories apply to you, and you should ask them rather than take a hosting company's word for it. The practical shape of the problem is the same either way.

The shape is this. An examiner asks what your website said on a date eighteen months ago. You open the site. It says what it says today. The old version is gone, because saving a page overwrote it, and nobody kept a copy. There is no bad intent anywhere in that story. It is just how websites work by default.

The specific way this goes wrong

It is almost never a dramatic edit. It is a marketing coordinator softening a line about returns because somebody flagged it. It is a junior advisor's bio being updated after they leave. It is a fee schedule that got refreshed when the fee changed. Each of those is a reasonable, well-meant change, and each of them destroys the only copy of what the firm was publishing on a given date.

The riskiest pages are the ones that feel most harmless to edit: bios, the fees or pricing page, and anything that mentions past results. Those are exactly the pages a review will land on.

How to edit the site without losing the trail

Most of the damage happens because editing is too easy and too undocumented. Four or five people have logins, changes go live instantly, and there is no note anywhere of who changed what. Fixing that is mostly process, and it costs nothing.

1. Capture before you touch

   Take the dated copy of the page first, before the edit, not after. After is too late. Make it the first step of the task rather than a separate chore, because a separate chore does not get done.

2. Give people their own login

   Shared logins are the reason nobody can say who made a change. Individual accounts turn every edit into an attributable one, and they let you remove access the day somebody leaves rather than changing a password everyone knows.

3. Route anything substantive through review

   Not typo fixes. Anything describing performance, services, credentials, or fees. Decide in advance which pages are in that category and write the list down, so the question is never argued in the moment.

4. Keep a plain change log

   Date, page, who, what changed, who approved it. A spreadsheet is fine. The point is that when you are asked about a change two years later, you are reading a record rather than reconstructing a memory.

5. Review the whole site on a schedule

   Once or twice a year, read every page as though you had never seen it. Stale bios, a departed advisor still listed, an old fee, a disclosure that no longer matches the ADV. This is where most findings actually come from.

None of that requires a particular host or a particular platform. It requires that the site is something you can edit deliberately, and that the people editing it are named.

Where web hosting for financial advisors matters

Set the record problem aside for a moment. As a piece of technology, an advisory firm's website is not demanding. It is a handful of pages, some biographies, a contact form, occasionally a blog. Shared hosting handles that comfortably and the entry tier is usually genuinely enough. The load is not the issue.

Three things do deserve attention, and they are all about trust rather than capacity.

The certificate

Every page needs to be served over HTTPS, not just the contact form. A browser warning on a financial firm's website is the fastest way to lose a prospect who was already unsure. See SSL certificates for what is involved. This is table stakes and it is cheap.

The contact form

Prospects will type things into it that they should not: account numbers, balances, dates of birth, sometimes a full financial picture. You cannot stop them. What you can do is not invite it. Keep the form to name, email, phone and a short message, say plainly above it not to include account details, and make sure submissions land in a mailbox at your own domain rather than a personal one. Whatever arrives in that form becomes correspondence you may have to retain, so know where it goes. Business email at your own domain is covered on the email page.

Ownership of the site itself

A surprising number of firms cannot log in to their own website, because a marketing agency or a departed employee holds the domain and the hosting. That is a serious problem for a business whose records live there. If you are not certain the domain is registered to the firm and that you can reach the hosting account, find out this week. Taking over a website walks through how to get control back.

How AldoMedia helps

AldoMedia has built and looked after websites for Western New York businesses since 1999. We are an independent authorised reseller rather than the operator of the underlying platform, and we are a web company, not a compliance firm. We will not tell you what your retention obligations are. What we will do is make sure the site is on a sensible plan, that the certificate is right, that individual people have individual logins, that the contact form goes somewhere you control, and that the domain is registered to the firm rather than to somebody who used to work for you.

If your compliance consultant names an archiving vendor, we will get the site set up so that vendor can do its job. Current pricing on plans is on the hosting page. Call 716-771-2536 or tell us what your site runs on and we will tell you plainly whether the plan you are paying for is already the right one.