More importantly – if your website goes down, can you recover it at all?

Yea I know… this has nothing to do with marketing – but it’s a very valuable and important business lesson.

Here’s a quick story from my recent personal experience.

All my websites are physically located on a well-known and reputable hosting company’s computer servers, and I pay them a small monthly fee to rent that computer space.

Well last week, the server that hosted several of my websites crashed with a serious hardware problem (unfortunately, computers do that).

So every website, and all the associated email accounts on that server went down for almost two days while they repaired the computer. Grrr… After the repair, they tried to restore from their backup, which was only partially successful.

But there are different levels and types of backups, and theirs didn’t completely back up the databases on my websites before they crashed. When the hardware was finally repaired, I still had to restore the databases on my websites with MY backups, which were fairly recent.

All of my websites are based on WordPress, and I use a plugin called BackupBuddy that backs up everything on my websites. Easily, and Soup to nuts.

Without my own backups, I might have had to recreate those websites from scratch.

The moral of my story:

Make sure you have current and regular backups of your company website!

There are many reasons a website can fail. Viruses, malware, hardware failure, bad programming, not paying your hosting bill…

The key is to think of your website like a computer – you gotta backup important data on a regular basis (I’m assuming your website is important). And keep copies of any backups on your own computers, too.

Talk to your web designer, developer, or hosting company to make sure your website can be fully restore in a reasonably short time if something happens.

Your business can probably continue to operate if your website goes down, but what if you don’t have access to your company email?

Don’t wait till it’s too late.

Leave me a comment below…

If you want help with your marketing strategy, writing effective sales copy, have any comments, or have a marketing project you’d like help with, e-mail me or call me at 603-686-5140

If you need help with website design, writing SEO optimized web copy, email marketing, or other online marketing strategies, I can help!

To your marketing success!

Merrill Clark

Website and Marketing Copywriter

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