Are You Prepared For Disaster?

[Peter Adamson]

Statistics show that 90% of businesses go bankrupt within a year of total loss of data. This usually happens because of fire or flood and computers are wiped out along with backups which were not stored off site. As Internet Marketers, we rely on our hosting provider to keep things moving, and our email autoresponder to keep our lists.

But what would happen if these crashed? How long would you be in business without your web site? Or without your email list? Disaster recovery is possibly more important for online business than for traditional business.

So I put together a short check list of what to do to prepare for any eventuality.

1) Have a written plan to recover from any server incident. Make a careful inventory of everything you would need to do to build your web site again from scratch. Go into great detail. If you installed WordPress with Fantastico the first time, do you know how to build it from scratch again, recreate all the template modifications and add the missing posts and comments? If not, you'd better find out. When you have finished your disaster recovery manual, print it out on physical paper and put it in a ring binder with all of your other important information (longin details for your domain registrar, telephone number of your hosting provider... you do have such a ring binder, don't you?)

2) Make regular off line backups. This obviously means all the static html and image files. But if you have dynamic content with WordPress, Joomla or any other CMS, you need to back up your mySQL database regularly as well. Mine is backed up on the server every 15 minutes, and backed up off line once an hour. If you don't know how to do this, ask your hosting provider. There is usually a backup feature in your Plesk or CPanel, but you need to get that stored off line for complete protection. Find an ftp client that can be programmed to log in and fetch a file at regular intervals. Leave your computer on and have this occur around the clock. If anyone knows a good ftp client that does this, post it here (I use a perl script). Be sure you do the same for your email list as for your web site, if you outsource your mailings. If you have a VPS you can have automated block level incremental backups performed online around the clock. See BlackBackup - Store Your Data in the Black Bunker.

3) Do not host your email on the same server as your web site. If your web site crashes, and your customers can't get to it, the first thing they will do is look in their inbox for your email address and email you. If your mail server is also down the mail will bounce and they will think you have gone under. What does this mean exactly? Let's say your domain is foobar.tv and your web site is www.foobar.tv. Your hosting provider probably offered mail hosting as a standard feature of your web hosting account, and you happily used it without thinking. So when someone emails nobody@foobar.tv, the email goes to the mail server on the very same machine as your web server. This is what we want to avoid. I recommend using Google Apps. It is free and you can count on very high uptime. To do this you need to set up your own domain on Google' servers, then edit the DNS entries for your domain and point the MX records at Google's mail server. You would do this wherever your DNS hosting is done. It could be either your domain registrar or your web hosting provider. This is explained in Google's documentation which is not for the faint of heart. If it would help someone I could write a separate tutorial on this alone.

That's it in a nutshell. I do not claim that this is an ISO 9000 certified disaster recovery plan. But if you only do what is written in this post, you will be 95% disaster proof. A meteorite could hit your hosting provider's data center and you would be back on line within 24 hours.

Did I leave anything out? Comments, please!

[rosetrees]

Thanks for that - especially point 3 - which I have to confess I hadn't given thought to.

All my websites (and all my customers) simultaneously disappeared a few weeks ago when my server was attacked. I decided panicking was pointless, so chilled til it was sorted. I had all the necessary backups etc.

I became more paranoid than ever about backups and subscribed to carbonite.

But the point about onsite email hadn't occurred to me. I might need that tutorial.

[BigRedNotebook]

Rock solid advice.

I'd add one other option for those who aren't backing up properly and who won't be able to set aside the time necessary to do things correctly for awhile... Open a Gmail account and send copies of completed work, critical documents, key info, etc. to yourself. That gives you a half-decent, entirely free and reliable (so far) backup system on the cloud.

It's not a perfect substitute for what you've outlined, but it is a fast way to gain some protection. The ease of use and price tag are nice, too.

Carson

[SpankD]

Great post. I try to express the urgency to clients that backups are there responsibility. If there hosting has issues or theres some catastrophic problem then the responsibilty of correction always come back to the client.
Backup Backup Backup, Lists, hosting, anything of value.

[AdBirds Design]

I agree with # 3 the most. Good advice.

[mikeyman120]

Originally Posted by Peter Adamson

3) Do not host your email on the same server as your web site. If your web site crashes, and your customers can't get to it, the first thing they will do is look in their inbox for your email address and email you. If your mail server is also down the mail will bounce and they will think you have gone under.

Cool tip. I use hostgator for hosting and email so I guess I do this. Never gave much thought to it.

Mike

[alltekbee]

Wow! Great info!

[Pete Grantaire]

Solid advice. I would hate to imagine what would happen if I lost the contact information and history of all my customers AND my website simultaneously...

Oh jeez, now I'm getting paranoid! Better go find a good online and offline backup service.

[Jimerson Farveez]

Great advice. Let me bookmark this page
Normally, I used to get backups and store them on some other servers located away from my location. Hope that helps too.

[GuerrillaIM]

Welcome to ICU Backup --> free 2gb backup account