Always have a backup plan. Don’t be cut off from your online business opportunities.

By Jeremy Sanders
4/23/09

One thing I have learned during the ten years that I have run an internet company is expect the unexpected. For example, one of the servers that I was renting was totally cut off from the internet when a car accident caused a fire that damaged the fiber-optic lines running to the building where it was housed. I was left stranded with no email, no website and clients calling me every five minutes asking what was going on.

This taught me that I always need to have a backup plan in case of unforeseen problems. Make a list of the things you rely on to conduct your business online and plan accordingly.

For email, always have a secondary email address that is on a different server than your main email. If your monthly internet plan with your ISP (internet service provider) included email addresses, make sure you have access to them and create a specific one for business contact. If you don’t have email from your ISP, sign up for a free email account with Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! or similar email companies. Then, if a client calls you and says he or she can not send you an important email, you can direct them to a secondary email address.

If you receive files or send files via FTP to or from your site, and you lose internet connection on your site, you can miss receiving files that are important to your business. There are ftp sites online that you can set up and use to send and receive files. One example is www.yousendit.com. It simply asks for the email address of the person to receive the file and you choose the file you want to send them. The recipient receives an email letting them know there is a file waiting for them to download.

If your website goes down, there is no real way to switch it over to a different provider without delay. Most of the time you just have to wait out the downtime – and all hosting companies have downtimes periodically – and then get back to business when it comes back online. You can set up a secondary site on a different server with a different domain name, but you would have to make sure that customers know what that address is.

Another issue to consider is what would happen if the server that your website is on were to get damaged and lose all data. Most hosting companies offer daily, weekly, or monthly backups in case of issues such as bad hard drives or servers being hacked. Find out from your hosting company what their backup schedule is and if it is good enough for your needs. Also, if you have ftp access to your site, periodically create your own backups in case you need to move your site to a new host or if a file gets corrupted and needs replaced.