How would losing your web site affect your business?

That might seem like a silly question, but a surprising number of small organizations don't think it can happen to them. Think again -- web sites get lost all the time, through a variety of means. The server hosting your site might have a hardware failure. Your site might get hacked. Your web developer might accidentally delete something critical. Your host might go out of business, leaving you stranded. If you're in the tech world, you hear about these incidents all the time.

When you're using a Content Management System (CMS) such as Drupal, Word Press, or Joomla, there are even more ways things can go wrong. Your database can get corrupted. There's lots more ways an attacker can break in. Your site changes much more often, so backups get more difficult. Traffic spikes can make your site unresponsive, with much less traffic than a static site. A security update can break functionality.

You really only have 3 options:

1. Spend a lot of time making sure your site is kept up to date, backups are in good shape, and you're covered for the most likely causes of failure

2. Pay somebody to make sure your site is kept up to date, backups are in good shape, and you're covered for the most likely causes of failure

3. Take a chance that you won't have a mishap, and if you're wrong, pay the consequences of lost data, missed opportunities from having your web site gone, loss of reputation for not being able to keep a professional web presence, cost of hiring professionals to clean up the mess (potentially at a higher emergency rate)

Which choice have you made?

Obviously, if your web presence is not critical to your business, you can get away with door #3. At worst, you'll need to recreate your site from scratch. For personal sites, hobby sites, or small businesses who mainly market their services through other means, a $10/month shared host and a $500 site may be all you need.

As your business grows, however, that becomes less and less an acceptable choice. You buy insurance, don't you? Why not take measures to prevent you from having a major business setback?

What needs to be done to cover the most likely causes of failure?

At Freelock, we spend a lot of time thinking about what can go wrong with a web site, and how we can prevent failures from hurting our clients' operations. The cornerstone is having really good backups.

Is one backup enough? Find out next...

Or skip ahead to some of the other things we think about when helping our customers protect themselves from data loss: