Disaster Recovery

Just ran across a sad story where Digital Ocean is accused of killing a startup:

The news was supposed to come out Tuesday, but it leaked early. Last week we learned about three variations of a new class of attacks on modern computing, before many vendors could release a patch -- and we come to find out that the root cause may be entirely unpatchable, and can only be fixed by buying new computers.

Today Microsoft released a patch -- which they had to quickly pull when they discovered that it crashed computers with AMD chips.

Essentially Spectre and Meltdown demonstrate a new way of attacking your smartphone, your laptop, your company's web server, your desktop, maybe even your tv and refrigerator.

This all sounds dreadfully scary. And it is... but don't panic! Instead, read on to learn how this might affect you, your website, and what you can do to prevent bad things from getting worse.

This is why you want to be on our maintenance plans. Our number one priority is recoverability, from just about any risk. And today, we had a client that needed this, in a very bad way!

A past customer just called, with email trouble... suddenly their email had stopped delivering. This customer had been acquired by another company, and we had shut off their web hosting service months ago, as their website had been retired.

Not 4 hours after posting my most recent blog stressing the importance of setting up systems with disaster recovery in mind, fate stepped up and thwacked me. "Oh yeah, think you're so resilient?

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.