When good hosts go bad...

[TRau]

Even the best of hosts can take a turn for the worse or suffer some major failure. If you value your sites it is up to you to make certain you have current backups. If your business depends on those sites then it is your responsibilty to make certain you have contingency plans.
I bring this up after reading for the last week in various forums the trials and tribulations of the users of Dinix, now Webhostplus. Dinix was well respected, got many rave reviews and seemed to have a strong and loyal following. Webhostplus bought them and last week the servers were moved (physically), some users were still down a week later.
This shows that even well respected hosts can undergo changes and you can be left waiting for a week for your server to come back up. Always be prepared, always have backups, always have other hosts picked out in case you find you need to move with short notice (or none).

 

[ldcdc]

some users were still down a week later.

Even though the VPS customers were initially promised they won't face any kind of downtime. A real fiasco.

Always be prepared, always have backups, always have other hosts picked out in case you find you need to move with short notice (or none).

Great advice Thomas! You can never have a much too recent back-up. I can only agree that some of the Dinix customers were utterly (and unreasonably) unprepared.

 

[dubs]

Thanks for the imformative post, and good advice.

 

[TRau]

You can never have a much too recent back-up. I can only agree that some of the Dinix customers were utterly (and unreasonably) unprepared.

It's a theme that repeats again and again. If your business depends on your site and you don't keep up to date back ups you are flirting with disaster. If your business depends on email then you should at the very least have a store/forward service with someone else, so that if your mail server goes down emails don't get bounced back as undeliverable.
Heck my simple little personal hobby related website gets backed up once a week, I can't imagine that people running a business were caught without a recent backup.

 

[webfreak08]

Heck my simple little personal hobby related website gets backed up once a week, I can't imagine that people running a business were caught without a recent backup.

Either those people are lazy, think that bad things won't happen to them, or a combination of the two. If a website is important someone, I'd expect them to do everything possible to make sure that it stays up. And, in the event of downtime or if their data is lost, that they have a backup that they could easily use to get their website back on the Internet as quickly as possible. Business websites are created to make money and no site means no money.

 

[TRau]

A combination of the two along with a third. The third being that they expect someone else to do it. They feel the host will back things up. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. Do you really want to bet your business on it? Also many hosts think a suitable backup is a second drive in the server that they backup to, while that is better than nothing it is not a proper way to backup.
I run across the same thing from time to time in my business (network support). Clients that have a hard time understanding why they should spend money for a real server with raid, a dat drive or better, etc. They show me a quote from DELL for a SC420 with single IDE drive and a travan tape drive for 1/4 the price of the server I quoted them. Most do get it after I explain the differences between the two servers and ask them do they really want to bet their business on that. Amazing they won't think twice about ordering a new color copier for $15,000, but want to cut corners on their server.

 

[Simon]

Amazing they won't think twice about ordering a new color copier for $15,000, but want to cut corners on their server.

Too true.

We have one client here (local) that spent out over $35k on his office tech system (5 workstations and a print station) but when purchasing a server, he tried to cut so many corners it was almost painful to hear him scrimping.

Even worse; try explaining the benefits of clustering to the same person.

Simon

 

[sweetz]

thanx for the advice and ill take it into consideration!!

 

[TRau]

thanx for the advice and ill take it into consideration!!

Please do, if you search through the threads of the various forums you'll see a recurring theme. Drives fail, backups fail, site are gone. It also amazes me how each time this happens you have people claiming to be losing thousands of dollars a day in sales yet they had no back up of their own.

 

[Naeem|THB]

This shows that even well respected hosts can undergo changes and you can be left waiting for a week for your server to come back up. Always be prepared, always have backups, always have other hosts picked out in case you find you need to move with short notice (or none).

That's so true, Things like that often have when hosts are bought out, I see threads at various forums saying similar things, But when your moving a lot of clients over things can get a little messy no excuse nevertheless.
Regards,