Is Your Website Backed-Up?
This week one of our e-commerce clients, who maintains a complex shopping cart based website, contacted us to sort out what we initially thought was a minor technical problem with their website.
The issue had come about because the client’s IT provider had taken it upon himself to modify some aspects of the site’s functionality without consultation with us, the site’s original developers.
Unfortunately, when he’d re-uploaded the site to the web after his modifications, it was found that the site was failing to display correctly and as such the client called us with a request to sort out the issue.
Rapid Support
We’re always on-hand to support our clients whenever we can and given the detrimental impact of this issue to the client’s business, we started to investigate the problem immediately with a view to getting it resolved as a matter of urgency.
However, once we’d ‘got under the bonnet’ so to speak, we discovered that the apparently minor issue was a major one.
Whilst trying to modify the site himself, the client’s IT provider had inadvertently deleted many of the database records that were used to populate the site with products and content. Such content had been added to the site by the client using their site’s content management system over a number of weeks.
Disaster Recovery
Under normal circumstances, if the client was using our web hosting services, this wouldn’t be such a big deal as we maintain a daily tape back-up of all the data and files that are associated with our client’s websites. This would have allowed us to restore from back-up, the deleted website files and database records for this particular client’s website.
However, the client had chosen not to host his site with us, but with a lower cost provider who as it now turns out, don’t offer a back-up service.
Offering a daily back-up for websites on a web server is common sense you would think, particular where the website is critical to a business. However you’d be surprised at the number of hosting providers who don’t offer it. Just ask your own. You may be in for a shock.
This fact made us feel sick and we dreaded telling the client that whilst we could restore the site’s page files from our own local back-up, the database records for the site and as such, all the site’s product and text content had been lost. They would need to re-enter all the data for their website again.
So there’s a lesson to be learned here!
Choose your Web Host Wisely
Not all hosting providers are the same; web hosting tends to be sold as a ‘commodity item’ and is often sold on price above and beyond what benefits it can bring to a business.
So be careful when choosing your hosting provider. 500Mb of web space for a few pounds a year may sound attractive, but do you really need 500Mb of web-space and does the provider offer you the technical support, security and disaster recovery aspects that any business critical website needs.
The reassurance of such aspects is surely a priority over cost when choosing a hosting provider.
If you use a web hosting provider that doesn’t offer you the support you need, give us a call and we’ll walk you through why you should use us as your web hosting provider.
Tags: choosing a web hosting provider, data back-ups, website back-ups, website hosting
