Do you have a crash plan for your website?

Posted by Andrei on July 06, 2016 in How To's, Web Hosting

Are you prepared for the worst? What measure will you take if your website goes down for a couple of hours? We are aware that fully preventing outages isn’t possible, yet if you plan and careful select the right technology and hosting partners, your website can protect itself against unnecessary downtime.

Having a crash strategy for your site is very important if you plan to run a successful business. Consider the following strategies to prevent crashes that can alter or seriously damage your business.

Backup, backup, backup. Performing daily backups of all your website systems is a mandatory step for a crash plan. Every hosting company includes backup services in case you need to retrieve certain files lost during the crash. But, you should also back up your entire website by yourself, even if your hosting company does that. You can use a free software such as FileZilla.

Hosting options. Unfortunately, there isn’t such thing as a 100% uptime, so be sure to choose a trustworthy and reliable hosting company. Then, you should consider what level of service your business needs. If your site has customer data or processes orders, you really shouldn’t use a shared hosting package because the security isn’t strong enough. We recommend to get a VPS (virtual private server) hosting package, a dedicated server that is private and secured on a physical server via visualization technology. A dedicated physical server is the most advanced hosting solution, and it can handle high end sites with huge daily traffic. But, before choosing any of these options, you should do an extensive research about all the hosting solutions out there.

Log and monitor. If you own a revenue-generating website, you shouldn’t leave everything to your hosting provider. As we said before, you can have a certain level of control by doing your own backups. You can maintain a manual log of the changes made to your website, who made them, and when. All of these will speed the restoration of your site in case of an outage. You can use a website monitoring service, that sends you emails if your site is down at a particular location. There is a huge variety of website monitoring services, so choose the one that suits you the most.

But, if it happens and your website goes down, don’t panic. Try to stay calm and call your hosting provider to see what’s happening. Then, you should check websites as downforeveryoneorjustme.com to see if the problem is on a large scale or not.

As soon as you can, tell your customers about the problem and let them know when things will get back to normal. Don’t forget that it is very important to communicate with your clients during these website crashes.