What’s your plan B?

How good is your back up plan?

As some of you may have noticed, this site was down for around 25 minutes earlier today.  There was a problem, caused by a plugin that was creating gigabytes and gigabytes of data, which had been installed on one of my test sites.

Part of the problem, was that the database for this blog had became corrupted.  In other words, every post and every comment was unreadable and the sites were inaccessible.

So, I put my blog continuity plan into action

Plan B started with a call to the guys at WebFusion, where my dedicated server is based.  I told them my blogs were down and within minutes, one of their tech support guys, Oliver Burkill, had taken ownership of the problem and started resolving the issue.  He identified what was wrong and was then able to get the blogs back up, using back-up copies, which are generated each day.  What could have been a nightmare, was averted.  Though I lost some comments, the site was live and 100% stable again in minutes.

The 2 ingredients of my blog continuity plan were:

1. WebFusion: A super-responsive tech support team for my dedicated server.
2. Reliable, off site back-ups:  I had copy of each site, stored at a different location.

WebFusion:  Although this problem was nothing to do with by hosting provider, it did give me my first opportunity to see how they responded when there was a serious problem.  I want to start by saying that WebFusion sponsor this blog, though I was a happy customer well before that.

Since moving my sites to WebFusion last year, I have enjoyed 100% up-time.  That kind of 100% reliability is extremely important for me.  I want this site to be here, for you, when YOU need it. I want it to respond quickly and for you to have faith in it.  WebFusion’s response to my phone call (around 20 seconds) and their eagerness to take ownership of the problem, justified my faith in them completely. It has made me an even more passionate advocate of their dedicated hosting services.

By the way, I am not an affiliate of WebFusion, so I don’t get paid for you clicking on their links.  I recommend them because I trust them and consider them a key part of my blog’s team.

Is their service cheap?  No, there are cheaper providers.  Is it value for money? ABSOLUTELY!

Reliable backups:  If I had not implemented a back-up strategy for my blogs, there’s a very good chance that I would have lost most, if not all, my blog posts and comments.  The data files had become corrupted and I don’t want to think about how hard it would have been to rebuild almost 3 years worth of data (and that’s just this site!)

I have a service in place, which creates a back-up of my blogs and sends them to a separate server.  There are many services offering that facility, as well as some plugins for wordpress, which offer back-up functionality.  Whatever solution you pick, make sure you get something in place BEFORE you need it.  As they say, you have to back it up, if you want to get it back.  I use a back-up facility that saves my data on a different server, so that if the hard drives on my actual server failed, the off site back-ups would not be impacted.  If you have a commercial blog, I recommend you get the most reliable back-up solution possible.

All in all, the damage was confined to the loss of around 20 comments, which were left here in the period after the last back-up was made.  These were mainly on this post from yesterday.  I also lost around 25 minutes of up time.  When I think about the damage that would have been done had the past 3 years of posts and comments been lost, it blows my mind.  I would also like to publicly thank; Oli Burkill, Richard Winslow and Craig for their help today.

If you have a business blog and you value the content, make sure you have the best tech support, server reliability and back-up systems you can get.  Take action now, before you need it.