Maintaining an uninterrupted online presence is a challenging endeavor. Achieving flawless 100% uptime is a luxury that only a few companies can afford.
For this reason, in addition to selecting reliable platforms for their websites, small businesses should dedicate time and effort to crafting an effective recovery plan. This plan ensures minimal downtime and swift restoration of services if the need arises.
Explore our comprehensive list of strategies that you can implement to be well-prepared for addressing performance issues, as virtually no entity online is immune to such challenges.
Service Monitoring
Being offline doesn’t necessarily indicate issues with your hosting provider’s uptime. Therefore, it’s unwise to solely rely on your host’s notification system to monitor your site’s availability.
Instead, employ a website monitoring service that promptly notifies you through emails or text messages when your site experiences downtime at a specific location.
You have a range of tools at your disposal, both paid and free, to suit your specific needs. These tools ensure you receive immediate alerts about service disruptions, even if your site is only offline for a few seconds.
Consult our compilation of free site monitoring tools to make an informed choice.
Content Backups
Regularly backing up your websites and projects, preferably on a daily basis, is a fundamental requirement.
Most web hosting providers offer dependable daily backup services you can rely on. Here’s how to respond in case of content loss on your site:
Loss of data due to an issue on your side – In such cases, you can request your provider to restore your site from a backup. Typically, this process takes around an hour on average, assuming they’ve executed backups as promised. Loss of data due to a hosting provider’s server issue – Should your provider’s server become corrupted and your projects compromised, you can ask the provider to transfer your account to a secure server and restore the content from backup. Backups are typically performed on separate servers. Loss of data due to a hosting provider’s network issue – If your hosting provider’s network or infrastructure experiences a significant problem, it’s advisable to swiftly migrate to another provider. Regardless of whether they can restore your sites from backup or not, it’s better to switch providers to prevent potential long-term harm to your online presence.
For critical scenarios like the one mentioned above, experts suggest maintaining an off-provider copy of your entire website as an extra precaution. You can accomplish this by using free software like FileZilla to copy all your account data and files from the provider to your internal systems.
On our web hosting platform, we offer offsite backups as an additional backup option, allowing you to automatically back up your site’s content from your hosting account to your Google Drive or Dropbox account.
If you’re on the cPanel platform, generating a full or partial backup of your data is simple through a few clicks in your cPanel dashboard.
Dealing with an Outage
When your site experiences an outage, it’s crucial not to panic. The best way to avoid panic is to have a well-defined recovery plan in place.
Begin by contacting your hosting provider to determine if the issue lies on their end and inquire about an estimated time for resolution.
You can consult the ProperStatus portal and our Twitter account for updates regarding our server status.
Efforts should be made to inform your customers/users about the problem and provide an estimated time for the site’s restoration, which can be communicated through your social media channels.
For more complex issues, promptly and comprehensively restoring your site could involve technical expertise. If you lack the technical know-how for such situations, ensure you have a reliable IT consultant available to quickly restore your site in an emergency.
Additionally, it’s advisable to periodically review the components of your recovery plan, preferably annually. Check if your hosting provider’s communication channels are regularly updated to avoid missing crucial service updates.
Ensure that your offsite backups are functioning correctly to prevent potential data corruption. Also, confirm that your relied-upon IT consultant is available and adheres to their response times.
If your IT consultant is unavailable during an emergency, make sure there’s a backup plan in place.
Your web hosting provider strives to maintain its promised service uptime guarantee (typically around 99.9%).
However, this guarantee pertains to server-side performance and doesn’t account for risks like hacking or virus infections.
In the real world, unforeseen challenges are inevitable. Thus, it’s prudent to be prepared and have a swift recovery plan in place for your website(s).