Yesterday (2nd August) millions of sites around the world were affected by the problems with hosting services run by Bluehost, HostGator, HostMonster and JustHost.
Were you affected?
One internet marketer who ran a webinar yesterday but was unable to send people to the sales page at the end reported that they had lost hundreds of dollars of sales because of the problem.
Officially the sites are reporting that it was a technical fault with data migration that caused the problem whilst the New York Times hints that it may have been as a result of another massive Denial of Service (DoS) attack across the World similar to the one that took down GoDaddy earlier in the year.
Whatever the reason, millions of websites were affected, some for as much as 24 hours. If this was you, did it affect your business? How much did you lose out? For some businesses it will be obvious how much in potential sales were lost, for many others, they’ll never know. Just imagine if a potential customer came to check out your site yesterday and it was down. They would probably have just gone away and you will never know.
No service or site is completely immune to these threats. However there are things you can do to minimise any disruption caused.
One way is to make sure it’s not your site that is hacked and that involves securing the site as much as possible and ensuring that everything is up to date. Some people do this as a matter of course and they also have regular (preferably daily) backups. Do you?
On top of this we mirror our sites on two different hosting servers, so if one goes down we can, very quickly point the domain names to the alternative hosting.
Our monthly maintenance package covers the technical maintenance and for a limited time if you sign up for the professional package at just £25 per month we will also co-host your site.
More details can be found here http://www.justaskjean.co.uk/services/monthly-maintenance/ Take a look and see whether your site is worth it.
If your site is critical to your business, investing in a little technical insurance goes a long way!