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Comment by rocketpastsix | Hacker News Reader

One thing that the outage really highlighted for me is how much small and medium size businesses rely on Facebook. That 6 hour outage costs somewhere into the billions of dollars lost for SMBs. If there was ever a time to highlight the need for a stand alone website, the great Facebook outage of 2021 is it.

Own your content, so the next time this happens, you aren't up a creek without a paddle.

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I agree with owning your content. But I don’t think hosting your own is guaranteed to have better uptime than FB.

There are other reasons better than uptime or lost revenue for having control of your presence. On the other hand, the network effect of FB is hard to deny.

I imagine alot of businesses have websites outside of facebook. just people don't go to them.

I wonder how this is.

People don't Google-search them?

Bad/no SEO or similar?

"Facebook-Only" ads? Is there no other "as effective" ad platform or method? Is there some sort of cult mentality around Facebook ads [and/or ads on other platforms]?

People in 2021 just don't think "Gee, I wonder if that place has a website"? My local nobody "mom & pop" drycleaner seamstress has a website, or at least is Internet-searchable.

> People don't Google-search them?

Google search takes me to business' Facebook pages all the time.

I don't have a Facebook account, but end up there pretty often because lots of small businesses only have a web presence on Facebook. Google finds them just fine. IIRC some even set their Google Maps website link to their Facebook page.

I hate social media generally, but it'd be hard to argue that your average small business, craft seller, et c., shouldn't prioritize a Facebook page over a "real" website.

Good sales pitch for a freelance web developer

It honestly is. Thinking from an angle of restaurants, who use Facebook as their one stop shop for everything: hours, location, menu. All of that can be relatively static with a small monthly fee to update content as the menu changes.

Definitely an opening there for a freelancer, or small shop, to get in and build up some basic templates to reuse too.

Isn't that essentially the value prop. of Squarespace and similar services?

yes, essentially. However you still have to get small business to lessen their over reliance on Facebook.

I'm not sure it is. "Facebook went down for six hours and it was so rare that it made international news. You should consider paying me $100+/hr to build and maintain a website for you as a backup." Doesn't seem like obvious ROI.

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