What's Your Website Backup Strategy?

Services

I was reminded recently just how important it is to have a strategy in place in case something goes wrong, breaks, or mother nature throws you a curve ball. Without a website backup strategy, you put your entire business at risk. Let me share some stories with you.

Backup Strategy Failure Example

As an example, hurricane Sandy caused a lot of damage to the northeastern part of the US. I personally know that a large company fell short with having a backup strategy. This company provides a service to hospitals all across the country but because of the storm a very important part of their service was down. This caused some hospitals to have to do things manually until the system was back up and running.

In their defense, this company does in fact have a backup strategy. Unfortunately, their backup wasn't far enough inland to not be affected by the storm. I think Sandy not only caused a lot of property damage but they also gave this company a black eye at least as far as some of their customers are concerned.

Backup Strategy Missing Example

The town where I live is actually large enough that it should probably be classified as a city. Even though it has over 140,000 residents, it still manages to have a “small town” feel but that’s not the point. The point is that a couple of weeks ago their website was down. And it stayed down for a couple of days. Now I don't know what kind of traffic they get on a daily basis but can you imagine how many phone calls they received because it was down. I bet there were more than a few stressed out employees at the end of the day.

Example of Forwarding Strategy not Working

I know this guy who is getting up there in age who wants to give this online marketing thing a try. He really doesn't know that much about computers. In fact he has trouble even getting into his email account. His son purchased a domain name for him from probably THE largest hosting provided in the country if not the world.

We had this domain name forwarding to a different web address (he failed to mention that he already had a domain name when he purchased a website). The hosting company where the domain his son bought lives had a major issue with one of their servers. It just happened to be the server that housed this particular domain name.

As a result, the senior citizen, with very few computer skills, couldn't get to his website. He was frantic over this because it happened during the time he had a newspaper ad running asking people to go to his website. Now he could have had the ad list the web address where his website lives but he liked the other domain name better.

Do you have a Website Backup Strategy?

I am a firm believer that every website should have a complete backup strategy. Including storing those backups off-site (NOT ON YOUR COMPUTER). I also believe that every website should be kept updated to the latest version of software and scanned for malware (viruses or Trojans designed to cause damage). Using the latest version of software helps keep you safe but it won’t stop everything.

If you don't have a backup strategy for your website, give me a call. I offer an affordable website maintenance package for WordPress users that includes:

Monthly Backups of Website
Monthly Malware Scan
Updates to WordPress and all Plugins
I'll even do simple changes you want to your site. (Not to exceed 30 minutes labor)

You get all this for less than $80 a month.
Think about it – How much business could you lose because your website wasn't backed up?