What if your website packed up today ?

[Bagpuss]

Not that I always expect the worse but I've been having a few concerns about my website recently, about 4-5 weeks ago I discovered I'd lost a month of e-mail queries via the contact form ( down a black hole, never to be seen again ). It is working OK again now but only because it's being sent to my Hotmail address and not my business e-mail .

The chap who looks after it for me I believe actually hosts it on a server at his premises, as he does for other clients. I am now thinking, what if the premises went up in flames tonight along with the server, how would I/he recover my website ?? My website has been up and running for a while now and I like it and I am now thinking perhaps now is the time to have a dedicated hosting company take control of it. Has anyone been through this process recently ?
I don't want someone the other side of the world, I'd really like to be able to pickup the phone and speak to someone in this country and sleep better at night knowing they have a decent backup strategy and that continuity is ensured in case of a disaster.
Thanks in advance,
Adam The Picture Framer

[robbiez]

It's your website, why don't you have a back up on your hard drive in case of a disaster??

If you are paying someone to host your website you should have FTP access to the files that can easily be downloaded.

Regarding your email, why don't you have them sent to a few different email address, one to hotmail and one to your website email address??

[Not your average framer]

Many major organisations such as BT offer web hosting quite cheaply, like about £7 or £8 per month for far more web space than most of us will ever need to use.

I think that it is reasonable to assume that companies like BT will have taken the neccessary actions and precautions to ensure continuity of operation in the event of things going wrong.

[StevenG]

If your guy knows his stuff then he'll know the 1st rule of computing is 'backup'. If the worst did happen there's no reason why your site couldn't be easily moved to another web hosting company within hours. It wouldn't be rude to enquire about any disaster recovery/continuity plans that are in place.

[stcstc]

actually putting your site somewhere else isnt that difficult if the worst happens

the most time consuming bit will be changing the DNS entries and letting them propagate to the worlds DNS servers

[Richard Photofusion]

DNS... Like dentistry, if you know what you're doing, it doesn't hurt.

Waiting for host-Europe/123reg to bring the better half's Website back to life - they, along with fast hosts are down at the very bottom of a long list of disasters being recovered from.

As featurepiece says, enquire, plan, and act - even if the action is having your own copy of your site on a completely unrelated cloud/hdd.

[pramsay13]

As others have said I would ask him where your site is and what contingency plans are in place.
I do web design as well as framing and it is unusual for someone to run their own server, as there are far better solutions available for less cost and far less hassle.
I have server space from Amazon which is physically located in Ireland, and all my websites point to there. This is incredibly safe and well backed up.
I also have a backup of them on my own laptop as that's where I do the editing from, and I will also have a backup as part of my own external hard drive backup (albeit that's in the same house as laptop so a major fire would wipe out both of these).
You're obviously concerned about this as I've seen posts by you before, so ask the questions until you are satisfied with the answers, or change how you do your website.

[Bagpuss]

I think I must have had a "vision" when I wrote this over a week ago, as today at 11am my site did go down.... when I rang my web guy he told me he had moved it to another server that morning, without consulting me and from what I understand, the server he was moving it to would not accept my Joomla website. It's still down as I write this, I'm not even sure if he can get it back to how it was.

When I worked in the back office IT department at a London money broker, if we had released a software change during work hours I would have had a few hundred money brokers screaming at me, we would never have released any software without a way of backing it out. I'm going to leave him working on it tomorrow but I fear the worse.

Over the last 4 years that my website has been online it has secured a really good ranking, type in Google "Picture Framer Essex" and I was very near the top of page 1, this afternoon I had dropped down to page 5, a very dramatic fall from grace

[pramsay13]

Ouch, I'm afraid I'm not getting you on google at all now and I'm 8 pages in.
Time for a change methinks.

[Bagpuss]

Well today it is back up The web guy did make a backup, still keeping an eye on my rankings ( still page 5 Google ), he was surprised that it took affect so quickly, I'm hoping that it will work it's way up again soon.

A customer this morning showed me this web archive site when I thought I had lost my website
http://archive.org/web/web.php

It had been backed up on May 30th ? NICE TO KNOW !

[Steve N]

Bagpuss wrote:

"I think I must have had a "vision" when I wrote this over a week ago, as today at 11am my site did go down.... when I rang my web guy he told me he had moved it to another server that morning, without consulting me and from what I understand, the server he was moving it to would not accept my Joomla website. It's still down as I write this, I'm not even sure if he can get it back to how it was."

I would get rid of your web guy if he didn't know that the server would not be compatible with Joomla before moving your website

[Bagpuss]

A happy ending I'm pleased to say, I had an amicable meeting with my web guy today and this morning a friend called me to say it looks like my rankings are back to where they were before the crash.

I definitely need to move to Wordpress though , I was told that Joomla is no longer supported ?? Will schedule this in over the next couple of months, once things have calmed down a bit

[kev@frames]

FedEx's booking/tracking website has fallen down completely this week. That's been fun and games
Goes to show, no business is immune.