I'm writing this article today because the data centre that houses my web servers went down for two hours. You might be asking yourself why I would publicise this in an article. Surely this is not the way to impress customers!
The reason is that there are times when catastrophic things happen. In my case, some engineers caused problems with fibre connections which caused the data centre to be cut off from the Internet. This was devastating for me and for my customers. However, there are two important points which demonstrate the quality of the service I offer.
I have been using the same server suppliers since 2008 and they have rarely let me down. The last time that my servers went down for this long was over ten years ago. There have been a few occasions when services went down for a few minutes and just one or two occasions where it lasted any longer than this.
I make sure that the suppliers I use offer me an excellent service. This means that situations such as the one that occurred today are very rare indeed.
I also have another trick up my sleeve. I back up my websites religously. All websites are backed up every couple of days and larger sites such as database applications and ecommerce sites are backed up every hour or two. These back-ups are stored in secure encrypted servers in an entirely different data centre from the main servers.
Therefore, if the catstrophe had been even worse and the data was somehow unrecovarable, I would have been able to get my customers' websites back online in a speedy manner with negligible loss of data.
Ask your web designer or web host how often they have had service outages such as this. If your website goes down for more than a couple of minutes more than one or two times per month then something is seriously wrong. Nobody can guarantee 100% uptime but regular outages should not be happening.
Also, check with them how often they run back-ups. If you update your website regularly and it is not backed up on a regular basis then one day you might find yourself in trouble.
If you're worried about your current web hosting supplier then contact me today to see how I can help you.