How To Protect Your Online Business

As an Internet marketing professional, one truth of the business is that when your Website doesn't work, you have no business. Server interruptions can cost serious Internet Marketers thousands of dollars in just a few hours of down time. Funny enough, most marketers don't have a backup plan in place when a server goes down and the money making entity, namely your Website is not accessible by existing and potential customers.

Your Support Should Be On a Different Server or Host

When your business Website server goes down, there is not much you can do about it. It is a fact of doing business online, and unless you actually own your servers and pay an employee to maintain them, you are at the mercy of your hosting company. Savvy Internet marketers know the importance of having customer service and support areas of the Website hosted on a different server or with a different hosting service altogether. This means that if the main site goes down, the support site does not. Existing and potential clients can still access certain parts of your site such as their accounts. You can also use the support section of your Website to post alerts about the server situation on the rest of the site. By keeping customer service and support services on a separate server or host, you are assured that you still have a certain level of continuity and communication with your customers, without dropping off the face of the Internet altogether.

Choose a Hosting Company that Offers Auto Backup Service

Many quality hosting companies offer a backup service. This can work in one of two ways. The economy version of backup services means that your host will regularly (usually daily) and automatically back up the entire contents of your Website. This means that if the server outage is severe and any of your Website content is lost or corrupted, your host has a recent and full back-up of the entire site that can be reinstalled when the server issue is fixed. The better version of back-up services means that the hosting company actually has a mirror site so that if a server goes down, a visitor is automatically and seamlessly forwarded to the mirror site, which is an exact replica of your original site. This type of service generally costs more money but if your livelihood depends on your site being up and accessible at all times, it may be well worth the extra money.

Keep Off-Server Customer Information

You would not believe how many Internet marketers do not keep hard copy information of their customer database on a local computer. How silly is that? If the server goes down and damage is done, all this valuable information could be lost. Furthermore, you need to be able to reach important clients when your server goes down. You need to make it a critical task to continually back up your customer information including name, address, telephone number, and email address and order history. This way, when your servers go down, you can contact and reassure customers that you are working diligently to resolve the situation and your customers will feel connected and valued.

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There are some disasters you can avoid completely. For instance, the fates won't rest a Big Mac on your keyboard, but you might. There are others you can't - like acts of God, acts of your cranky neighbor, terrorists, or the weather.

The trick here is to plan for their possibility and take steps that make sense in context of managing risk

Heat Is The Enemy Of All Things Electronic - Pssst - fires are hot. Very.

While electronics generate their own heat (which can be significant, and if not managed well can be a problem too, see below) first we are concerned with external destructive heat like your building burning down.

A piece of paper can be locked in a box that will most likely withstand most any conventional fire. So can a data storage item like a diskette or jump-drive, in theory, but the damage point of such devices may be well below their melting point.

Fire Can Easily Destroy Everything In A Building

This might be obvious but we have seen smart people do some pretty dumb things, like keep the original of some data on a computer, keep a backup of the data on a CD in the desk on which the computer is sitting, and keep another backup in a lockbox in the closet six feet from that desk.

Sure, if the computer drive dies you're fine, but how hard is it to imagine a fire that destroys everything in a single room? It's easy.

We'll consider how to survive a fire (from a data and systems perspective) in a few minutes, but first, let's outline some guidelines. These are useful for more than just fires, too.

· Keep backups in separate physical locations. And I don't mean here, and four feet from here. We mean here, and Cleveland. Or here, and the World Wide Web. Or here, and in a safety deposit box on the other side of town.

· Update your backups on some understandable schedule. We knew a guy who smugly told us (after his office burned down) he was "all set" because he had backups. Well, he had backups up until about two years before the fire and nothing sooner, which rendered them almost useless. Use it or lose it, as they say.

· Have good insurance on your office equipment. Also, pay the premiums!