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Website Disaster Recovery – Help! Our Website has Disappeared!

By: James Walsh

Companies are spending millions to protect their businesses by engaging in effective business continuity planning. However, does your business continuity plan also include a website recovery plan? What happens when you invest huge amounts of money on an advertising campaign that is to be played on your website but your website crashes?

Why are Websites Important for Businesses?

According to recent studies, 67% of businesses claim that they have adequate data protection systems in place to protect their website. However, the research also shows that only 38% of these businesses tested these protection plans more than once a year. In this time and age, untested businesses plans can be easily considered as redundant business plans.

Approximately 73% of the mid-sized British companies are conducting their business online. Considering this fact, losing a website can very well mean losing potential business and money. Website sales are the easiest way for a business to gain profits because sales on a website do not require any extra expenditure such as display costs, salesman costs and rent costs that are associated with traditional store sales.

How Can Websites Crash?

It is very common for websites to crash and go out of service. Let us look at some of the reasons that can lead to a website crash.

  • Server failure can destroy your site files


  • Denial of Service (DoS) attack


  • Hacker attack


  • Hardware failures


  • Network failures


  • Trojan horses


  • Virus attack


  • Loss of domain name


  • Electrical faults


  • Abrupt closure of web hosting company


  • Technical support errors


  • Unexpected surge in visitor traffic


  • Accidental deletion of web files


What is Website Recovery Planning?

The Internet is an interesting yet dangerous place. Securing your data in a place where information is flowing from every corner of the earth across unprotected networks can be a tough proposition. Due to this reason, website of a company would need to be protected in a way that goes much beyond the traditional brick and mortar safety procedures. Website recovery planning has become an integral part of business continuity planning, especially amongst businesses that conduct online sales. Website recovery planning primarily can be explained as a three-part process as follows:

• Your first step would be to plan what your business would need so that the website can be viewed by the users even during the time of the crisis. Therefore, your business should make a detailed plan that should consider all the issues concerning live operations of the website. These issues will include but are not limited to hardware, networks, operating system, and all the scripts that helps keep your website running. If you are using a web hosting company, you will have to plan your course of action if the company closes or has a problem providing you with services. If you own your own web servers, you will have to plan your detailed recovery operations plans keeping in mind various types of failures including hardware failures.

• You will need to plan how you will send the communication across to the customers about the problems being encountered and how you will keep your customers happy even amidst the crisis. No amount of downtime will be acceptable to the customers. Therefore, make sure that you provide alternative ways for the customers to conduct their business with you. For example, you may have to give out information to the customers via a help line about the order status of the good ordered online.

• Backing up your files constitutes an integral part of the recovery planning process. Your web log files hold all kinds of valuable data and can come in handy in a time of crisis. Backing up your web log files would be the ideal scenario. However, the sheer nature of the volume of these files may not make it a feasible option for everyone.

Analyse if your company would be better off backing up the web statistics summary data. While backing up summary data will definitely be an advantageous option in terms of storage space, it may not the best option because your web logs contain far more information than the summary data. If there were any files or scripts that were used to create the website, make sure that you backup such files or scripts as well.

How to Backup Your Website Data?

While we have already discussed the importance of backing up website data regularly, our next challenge lies in understanding our best options for backing up this data. The choice of backup media would depend of the amount of data to be stored. The most inexpensive backup option would be to backup the data on DVDs. All a business would need is a DVD writer if it were to use this option.

Some businesses also use tapes to backup their website data. If the data to be stored is very huge in storage size, portable hard drives can be a good option. There are also web hosting companies that backup data every night. If you are a home or home office user, there are various website backup software available in the market that can make task at hand a very easy one.

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James Walsh is a freelance writer and copy editor. If you are concerned about data loss and would like more information on Data Recovery see www.fields-data-recovery.co.uk

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