What’s Your Biggest Worry with Your Web Server?

If you’re in business online, then your web server IS your business. So are you worried about something going wrong with it? You should be, because if something stuffs up there, it could see your business offline for several days or maybe even weeks, depending on the issue!

So what worries you? And what are you doing about it?

Your website/s getting hacked?

Where every index file in every directory is replaced by some weird anti-”something” message by some idiot with too much time on his hands?

It won’t happen often, but it’s $%^@$#%^@ annoying when it does, and depending on the size of your site, could take a few hours FTPing files to your web server to fix!

Your web server is offline?

Maybe something at the datacentre blew up or got flooded, or someone turned the power off accidentally, maybe even a hard drive died, or maybe your web host is doing scheduled “maintenance” which is taking a LOT longer than anticipated.

Now when (and not “if”) this happens… the question you’ll ask is… how LONG will my server be offline? Unfortunately, it is often in the several hours (3-6) range… one of mine was offline for about 16 hours at one stage, which meant I was not a happy chappy by the time it came back on!

The BIG problem is if this happens on a fairly “regular” basis… in which case you’d be looking at moving your sites to a new web host (which is a big job in itself)!

Your webserver is shut down?

Maybe your hosting company decided your web server was “abusing” the system (a common issue with shared hosting) so they turned it off and locked you out of it!

Well good luck with getting it unlocked so you can even download your files from the server. One scenario took me three days to persuade the hosting company to let me into my account so I could even try to work out WHY it was causing problems. They didn’t know, and it was only through examining my log files did I find I was under attack from some nutter in New Zealand! But it took three days to get that sorted. Again, not good

How about… Your hosting company just… Disappears???

Yes… it does happen – sometimes they just go out of business (or get forced out of business) with no warning to their customers, and there is simply no way you can access anything on their (now turned off) computers.

Well.. ALL of the above have happened to me at least once… or twice… in my time online. And each time something happened, it created a major inconvenience for my business…

But the thing that “saved” me from these events turning into a major “disaster”, and affecting my business for days on end, was because I had backups of all my sites!

Yeah – sorry – this is “another” reminder about the importance of creating backups of your websites Look… everybody KNOWS it’s important, so why don’t they just do it?

Especially when… if you have your backups…

• You can quickly replace files which have been altered by hackers, or lost because of hardware failures.

• And if the need arises, you can even get your sites back up and running quickly, by easily moving them to a new web host!

So it IS Important that You DO This!

If you’ve got your web hosting on a server which uses cPanel, then half the battle is over. The manual backup option is there waiting for you to just click a few buttons to download your site to your PC.

All you’ve got to do is remember to do it! And do it at least once a month – or more often if your site is regularly updated.

Well if you’ve found it difficult or inconvenient or (insert any other excuse why you don’t backup) to back up your cPanel website/s manually, I’ve found that fellow Aussie Aaron Dwyer from Queensland has some software that WILL be extremely useful to you!

Backup Smart is a very clever piece of cross-platform desktop software which works on Windows (XP+) and Intel Mac OSX (10.4+), to “automatically” download full backups of your cPanel websites to your local hard drive.

Just plug in your cPanel login info, tick a couple of boxes, set up a schedule, and Bob’s your Uncle… backup is taken care of, with everything that matters copied from your website to your hard drive!

And if you’ve got sites built with WordPress or Joomla etc which use SQL databases… then this has got all of that covered too!

Just let it run overnight if you’ve got lots of sites to backup – I’m currently downloading a 1.2GB backup set from one server to start the ball rolling, but the next ones won’t be as big.

Your biggest problem might be whether you have to upgrade your Internet connection if your ISP doesn’t gives you enough bandwidth each month to do regular backups.

Backup Smart software runs on Windows (XP+) and Intel Macs OSX (10.4+) and there is even a FREE 7 Day trial version, so there is just no excuse not to check it out!!!

You see, IF you have current backups of your websites, you can take fairly quick corrective action if you need to!

And the really good thing about cPanel based websites is the “restore” option… which can be used to “fix” a site on one server… or “move it” pretty quickly, fully setup, to a completely new web server!

So start protecting your web data… today!
»» Get Backup Smart Now
… and get piece of mind as well!

Here’s to stopping things getting in the way of your success!

Cheers
Stephen Spry

Oh… and P.S. for any web developers out there who are NOT doing this on behalf of their clients Maybe you should be backing up your client data for them. A little extra “value” you provide for their piece of mind!

Remember, however you do things, you simply cannot rely on any backup your web host says they may (or may not) do!