Forum Moderators: phranque
It should be that easy but is not. It doesn't matter if you are just starting up or setting a business on the web: stay online. The sad true is... there is little you can do to stay online when your hosting company fails. You might be surprised on how many things they offered to you are not real and this will increase your downtime.
Is worse when you depend on your server uptime to earn money, or even for your clients... worse for you: they won't stop calling you while they can't use their email. Share what you have learned, here is what I learned...
1. Separate domain handling and hosting
Put your files on a server and manage your domain names on another service. Chances are they won't fail at the same time and for what I have experienced over the years, domain name managing doesn't give that much trouble, except for the configuration files AT your hosting service (this is why they should be separated). (keep reading)
2. Consider two hosting accounts on separate hosting providers WITH the SAME SYSTEM (cpanel per example). This way if one goes out, move your files quickly to the other server and update your DNS info at your domain account. Better if you sync your files, like having duplicated servers, this way you will avoid the need of moving files at all, just update your DNS. (but.. mails, forum posts?... keep reading)
3. Keep your heavy sites separated
Don't put all of your eggs in one basket. If you depend on advertising and being online to earn money, choose carefully and keep your most important websites in separate servers, so if one goes down, AFF or Adsense will keep working on the other one. This will also mean less chances of server overloads when the traffic goes up in sites of the same market.
4. BACKUP your sites, your work
Zip, tar, etc.. then download, ok... For the many bad experiences I had, use your Cpanel backup function to create a backup and transfer it to another server in a compressed format. This way you can expand this info any time.
5. Backup before something happens
There is no way you can move your files from one server to another using cpanel backup function if the server goes down... you loose access to your files (sometimes) this means your website off line do no¿t precisely mean not having access to your files.... sometimes
The cpanel backup function allows the server to transfer the backup to another server via ftp, without using your internet service (downloading and then uploading)
6. Get a server with enough space
Shared hosting sucks most of the times but yes, the prices allow us today, to have some space for a few bucks. Not every website will use 1GIG of space... so you can use another server to backup your work.
7. Consider the search engines cache
Ok, it sounds horrible... but twice I lost everything on a blog... twice... and no mysql file to restore, no backup... so I set up the blog again and using google cache option I was able of copying and pasting some important posts and articles.
a. I had dns problems over the years and it was a hosting problem, I mean where the files are stored. Keeping my domain names on another company allows me to change the dns any time from one server to another if ones goes down. This way the website will be down only for the time the DNS take to make effect.
b. Backups... yea sure... I had experiences where the hard disk just died and they restored the last backup... from SIX months ago!, even saying they made daily or weekly backups... it was a lie.
c. Backup before something happens, is better to have a backup 1, 2 or 5 days old than SIX months old.
d. Don't think "is not going to happen" because you know? it does happen... bad things happen and to me, the worse was being 5 days offline with a group of websites, lucky me I had another account to move and update the DNS, so while everybody was posting hate comments to the techs, my sites were online.
The cpanel backup lets you expand it into any folder you want to... so you can move only the files you want instead of all the files if there is no need to do so.
And yes... from time to time download your full backup to your PC. Rent a nice move and watch it, eat... sleep... go walking while it downloads...
* ok I'm in a hurry, share what you think
