Planning for Catastrophic Failure.

Last week my entire online business was brought to it’s knees by my Internet Service Provider, Zen Internet.

I’ve used them for years and until last week they’ve provided excellent service and support — but that all changed on Thursday. Without any warning, their server’s broke, and almost every single one of my product sites disappeared, along with this blog (which is the hub of my business these days).

As you can see it’s all back this afternoon, but I’ve learnt (and also been reminded of) some extremely valuable lessons as a result of all this.

Here they are for your benefit also.

Please don’t make the same mistakes as me! If any part of your business benefits from (or even relies on) the Internet, take heed of the following.

1. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

My main mistake was to have all my web sites (my blog and my standalone product sites) hosted with the same Internet Service Provider.

I’m already in the process of spreading the hosting of my product web sites across different Internet Service Providers.

(That way if one of them ever screws up like Zen did you’ll still have a large percentage of your online business operational.)

2. We’ve all heard it time and time again … make regular backups.

Luckily I did have full backups of all my sites — I learnt that lesson the hard way a few years ago, but I know a lot of people won’t be backing up critical online data.

If any of your web sites capture data (like sales order and/or customer opt-ins) and stores it in an online database, make sure they’re being backed up regularly.

If you can backup your entire web sites, including all the pages, text, graphics and databases then you can quickly restore whenever necessary.

But there is a very important caveat…

3. Register your domain names with a different ISP (from the one who hosts your web site).

This was my main mistake.

If I had registered the domain name “EdRivis.com” with a different ISP, then I could have simply logged into the other ISP’s control panel and ‘pointed’ the domain name to a different Internet Service Provider’s web space (and restored my backup there).

I could have been up and running in less than a day after Zen broke down.

As it was, the domain name “EdRivis.com” was registered and is managed by Zen Internet. I’ve been more or less powerless while they were broken down..

ALWAYS register your domain name on a different ISP from the one who hosts your web sites.

(Ironically all of my home-study programmes show how to do that — but www.EdRivis.com was registered BEFORE I learnt to do that. Ouch. I’m in the process of moving it today… wish I’d done that a while ago before this happened!)

4. Planning for Catastrophic Failure.

Experts predict that one day the Internet will simply fall over… that it will be unable to bear the level of traffic/data and will collapse.

I don’t know how much chance there is of that happening, but if it does happens… will you remain in business?

The answer depends on whether you have downloaded all your customer and sales-lead details and store it offline… and if that information includes postal addresses.

Before I got into the Internet and web marketing I used to write database software for a living, so ALL of my customer data is stored in an offline database system. Is yours?

I hope this list helps you avoid a week like I just had.

-Ed.

Be Sociable, Share!

•