Could You Afford To Be Without Your Web Site Or Email?
By Alan Brooks & Nick Broom
If your hosting company went bust tomorrow, would your web site go down? If so, could you get it back up and running quickly and easily? And what about your email?
Sadly in the current environment this has become a real issue hitting businesses out of the blue. The impact can be inconvenient or potentially commercially disastrous. One business we know estimated they had lost over GBP 50,000 when their hoster went down recently.
If your web site is an important part of your sales or marketing operation we suggest reviewing how you would answer the following quick questions, or asking them of your suppliers:
Is your web site backed up anywhere? Do YOU have an up to date copy to restore the site should your provider disappear, or would you have to re-write it from memory?
How many potential points of failure are there between your office and your Internet Service Provider (ISP), web hosting provider, web site maintainer and email provider?
Do you know who to call if any of the above points fail?
Do you know how good your hosting company are? Are their servers backed up and secure? Is there any fail-safe in place and how would they cope with a power outage or server failure?
Are your domains (www.yourcompany.com) correctly registered so that you have control over the administration of them in the event of you needing to change suppliers? We advise all clients to ensure the administration rights are assigned to them. Many web agencies retain these rights for themselves in the small print of contracts, making it difficult for clients to move elsewhere.
Who is responsible for your email provision and what happens if your ADSL connection fails will your email be lost?
Do you know what the service level agreement (SLA) on your hosting contract actually means? Is it worth the paper it is written on?
In the current environment we really recommend that you take a few minutes to review this now. Please don’t wait until a problem takes you off line. In a tough market none of us can afford to be hard to find or, worse still, closed for business when customers are looking to buy. It is always cheaper to be prepared.
With this check list most businesses will be able to identify and remedy any problems. However, if you don’t feel that you have the resources or knowledge to tackle this issue or you are concerned about how this could affect key suppliers we can assist.
Posted on 9th June 2009.
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