Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
wow--how ironic that what seems to have occurred to WebmasterWorld this week happened to me, not nearly to the same degree, but just as potentially disasterous. I am hoping for some feedback on how to avoid in the future.
Background: I am a freelance web designer, pretty busy, in business for about a year & a half, and from the start, offered hosting as well, (for a variety of reasons, although I am rethinking this). I opened up a reseller account with what appeared to be a decent company (how very wrong I was) & began piling up clients on this host.
The writing was on the wall after Hurricane Rita. The servers, located in Houston were down for a very long 3-4 days and the problem was that there was absolutely no way to reach them to find out the problem. They used an answering service, and the answering service sent all messages via email, which the host company could not receive because their own web page was down as well. NO WAY to reach these people.
Once they were back up after Rita, their web page posted a few lame excuses about being frustrated with the server company that provided THEM the space (they were just buying resold space from EV1 in Houston.
All of this capped a year of declining service, so I decided to move all of my accounts. I began migrating them to a new host.
Then the bottom fell out. For what apparently were numerous TOS violations, MY hosting company's server(s) were literally pulled from the rack at EV1, never to be reinstated under any circumstances. No explanation, no communication, just all my sites, down right now, no hope of recovery.
Long story short, I accelerated the migration to the new servers. The problem: I had backups of my clients sites in varying degrees of currency. For those with content management systems, who do their own and frequent updates, the best I could do would be to update to the last version I had. For some, that meant months of changes lost.
For others, entire SQL databases gone. For the most part, I am back in business, as are the clients, but I am still picking up a few pieces here and there.
I am not thinking about getting away from hosting altogether. I make no money on the hosting end, it's mainly a courtesy to give clients an all-under-one-roof option. I never represented that I would back up data, and in fact, gave clients full cpanel access to their own accounts so they could, should they chose, back up themselves.
I am curious about other's thoughts regarding backing up hosted client's sites. Should they routinely expect that if I am reselling hosting space under my brand?
What if I were to develope a hosting TOS of my own specifying that back up of data, especially sites where the client is managing their own content?
I really prefer to concentrate on design. In fact, the majority of my time spent on tech support is host-related. I am not interested in continueing to coddle clients w/ hosting hand-holding anymore.
Do you provide hosting? Do you back up your clients sites as a general rule?
Any thoughts, feedback, etc would be appreciated.
best regards,
Pat
I had an almost identical situation happen to me about 2 years ago, maybe a little more. The blood rushes to my feet even now when I think about it. Hellish.
I like having client sites in-house so to speak though, so I moved to a dedicated server with a very good company (one of those Brett considered, though not the one he went with). It was a very big decision, as at the time I was a little off really needing a dedicated box.
They are certainly not the cheapest, but from that moment on I have not had a minute of trouble - the servers stay up, stuff works and if there is any reason to call support they are there, real people who really know their jobs, 24/7.
I pay for them to do backups, so I have no headaches there either.
Yes, it is relatively costly but I charge clients a good enough rate to make it pay and if the profit is not enormous then it is more than made up for by the time saved on dealing with hosting issues, since I hardly ever need to.
I now have three servers with them. One is resold to people who needed a whole one and wanted me to "manage" it for them - there is nothing to manage really, I have spent an hour on it in total in the last year, so that one is quite profitable. The others have my sites, my clients' sites plus a number of sites of the clients of other developers who wanted the sort of reliablility these servers offer but not to have a whole box.
I do not sell hosting separately, too much hassle. But this move to top notch servers has paid off hugely for me
The problem: I had backups of my clients sites in varying degrees of currency.
If you don't have backups, you do not have any real chance of recovering from a business disaster -- whether caused by fire, flooding, theft, or rug-pulling ISPs.
Regular backups, and some fairly recent experience of restoring them (so you know they are usable, and you know how to use them) should be absolutely standard practice for anyone responsible for data on the web.
