What Happens When You Loose Your Website?

A website crash is just about every online business owners nightmare – right up there with having your site hacked.

Do you know what you would do if you’re website crashed and you lost everything?  Can you imagine, waking up one morning and going to check your site to find you can’t access your website, your hosting provider isn’t responding to your support requests and they aren’t answering their phone calls or skype messages or anything?

After a few hours you realize that your hosting provider appears to be no more – it looks like they’ve closed up shop and just shut everything off.

Kinda makes you feel sick to the stomach doesn’t it?

So now, you contact your tech support person (assuming they are different to your hosting provider) and see what they can do…. Now, most techie people will say, “No problems – where are you site backups, files etc?”  Theoretically, in the event of a disaster like this, you should ‘simply’ be able to get new hosting, point your domain names, upload your backups and be up and running…

A simplistic solution – but one that has a lot of holes if you’re not sure what you really need.  How do I know this? I know this, because  I’ve been working with Janet Beckers from Wonderful Web Woman over the last few weeks to restore her sites – which were lost because her hosting provider ‘disappeared’.  I won’t rehash the whole story, you can read about it on Janets’ blog – I Quit.

The experience has shown me that regardless of the fact that we KNOW we should back up and have recovery plans, most of us don’t really know what we should  back up, how often and where we should store those files… As I also found out, theres also a whole heap of ancillary information like email addresses, forwarders, redirects etc etc etc….

Needless to say, after spending the last few weeks gathering information and recreating content to re-establish the Wonderful Web websites, I have also been looking at what can be done to ensure that we are protected….

Janet Beckers and I will be sharing what we’ve learnt on a SPECIAL WONDERFUL WEB WOMEN teleclass on February 1 US Eastern (February 2, Australian time) – why not come along and join us – we’re creating a great bonus for those who register!

How Do You Know Your Site Is Down?

One question that I am often asked is how do I know my site is down, without continually checking it myself?

There are services available that will automatically monitor your website, and send you an alert if it doesn’t respond.  From my investigations, there’s a number of options – some are free and some aren’t.

I found a service that I was pleased with – it provides a free service for basic monitoring, but also paid services if you need more…  So I became a reseller, so that I can include the service to my customers … Check out Is My Site Up Now and sign up for the free monitoring account for 1 website.  I’ll discuss monitoring your website in my next post and why you may want a paid account.

Have you had your website hacked or lost it?  What were your experiences.