Have you ever lost a Word document? Lost an email maybe? It happens, right! And it’s an absolute pain in the butt!
Not only do you lose a heap of time looking for it but there’s the stress and drama that goes with it.
Imagine if you lost your website!
And it happened to a colleague not so long ago. The story gets worse!
There was a server crash and he lost about 30 websites – yup, that’s thirty, as in 3 and 0. He swore… a lot!
What made it worse was there was no up to date backups. And get this, most were client sites.
Here’s the reality, a server is just a hard disc drive essentially, and they fail, it happens. Surely you’ve had a PC issue at some point… “touch wood”, same deal, they break.
I back up my own sites, and all my clients sites of course, on a regular basis.
But how do we back them up?
I have a strategic plan. I have to account for the fact that I might get hit by a Mac Truck, God forbid. If I’m as thin as sliced cheese and my clients can’t get to their back up that’s not going to help them get their website “live” again.
There are 2 parts to a website backup, this is in real simple layman’s terms.
There is all the database stuff which is all the techy in the cogs and behind the scenes coding and stuff and then there is the graphical elements and images. That’s the oversimplified version but that covers it.
So obviously we have 2 parts to our back up process, well, actually we have 3.
What we do is use a tool for all our websites, mine and my clients, that automatically does the database back up aspect. It even emails the back up out to them.
!Note for Smarter Website clients! You will now get a weekly email that contains a file with this database file. The attached file will look something like – “yourdomain_wrdp1_30102009_xxx.sql.gz”
I was having these all sent to me on a weekly basis but then I had a close shave with a Mac Truck. No, not really. I just figured that no-one knows all the stuff we do behind the scenes to keep your sites up and running and it was about time to blow our trumpet.
What do you do with this email! File it, just in case. (and pray I don’t get hit by a truck)
So what are the other 2 parts to the website back up?
The next is all the files and folders, where all the graphical and other stuff is. We back them up to a separate disc on the server, sort of like a mirror image of the first server drive. That way if there is an issue it flicks over to the other drive so your site is “live” at all times. No down time plus a safe back up.
The last part is to back them up externally, as in “off-site”. Server centres are very secure, they have fire protection and all manner of safety stuff in place but you just never know, especially in today’s world.
So what is your back up plan? Don’t do the “it’ll never happen to me” thing. Look, most shared servers and hosting do have auto back ups done but it is worth asking the question.
Here’s the “Sell” if there is one in this post! (This part either fits for you or it doesn’t)
We now do “reseller plans” so you can actually make money out of web hosting! It’s all on our very fast and sexy “dedicated server”. A “reseller plan” means you can make money from selling web hosting without having to do anything – money for nothing and forever.
I’m not going to go into the techy stuff but if you have multiple websites or reckon you have the opportunity to direct people to or sell good hosting then we need to talk. Contact me through that link or give me a call on 0413 733 272.
