Interruptions in Service
April 25th, 2006
As our communication moves online, it is important to consider how your business will handle an interruption in service.
My hosting service has proven very reliable over the years, so it was a little shocking to have my site go offline mid-way through the day. After a few failed attempts to connect, I decided it was time to swing over to my host’s support forum. It’s when that page failed to load as well that a cold shiver went down my back. Whatever it was, it took out the entire host’s data centre. Odds were pretty good this would take more than a few minutes to correct. Visions of a city being devoured by Godzilla forcing my site down ran through my head as I began to check my files to confirm I had a recent backups of all the sites I have hosted there.
The cause of the outage turned out to be a loss of power to the floor that the servers are located. The backup generators, which should have taken over, were only rigged to step up when the entire building lost power. After a couple of hours everything was back up and running again.
Of course, this was just a good reminder that your website needs to be considered in any disaster recovery plan your business might have. Normally, people think of their websites as a way to communicate in the wake of a disaster. But what if everything’s fine on the homefront and its your website that got caught in the disaster? If your webhost in Kansas is swept away to Oz by a tornado, or if Gus the janitor at the data center presses the big red button marked ‘do not press’, or should your host mysteriously vanish with neither a word nor a note, do you have a plan?
Do you know where your site is hosted?
What city? What state? What country? If the weather network is tracking a giant storm moving towards your host’s city, you at least have time to consult with your provider and see what they’re doing to ensure your site remains up. Even if you don’t keep watch on your host’s city, you can at least surmise after the fact what happened (’oh - I bet that volcano erruption is the reason we can’t connect to our host any more’). You can decide from there if you need to take further action.
Do you know how to contact your host?
Most reputable web hosts will have a direct line for tech support or updates on network status. Keep that number handy.
Do you have a secondary email account?
I keep a GMail account (theelusivefish@gmail.com) for the rare occasion where I may not be able to access my mail server. When my mail went down yesterday I was still able to do business.
Do you have your own backup of the site?
While most hosts provide backups as par for the course, Murphey’s Law would have your site be the one and only that is mysteriously unrecoverable. As well, it’s important to consider that, depending upon the reason for the downtime, you may need to switch providers. Having your own backup gives you the ability to act.
