Although most web hosting companies will promise VPS hosting or dedicated hosting services with 98% uptime, failing to plan for that 2% of downtime is planning to fail. Having a crash plan is therefore extremely important for the overall success of your website.
No webhosting company promises 100% uptime, and for good reason: It isn’t possible to fully prevent outages. However, safeguarding your site against downtime requires certain precautions, including the right technology and software, the right hosting partner, and the right managed services.
Steps to a Crash Proof Plan
Backup
Getting into a habit of performing daily system backups is a good practice. Although the majority of backup work for your website itself is done by your web host provider, you shouldn’t rely on this alone. In fact, you are actually able to back up your entire website on your own by going into the website control panel and copying all of your website’s data and files and saving them to your own internal system.
Having a backup server and battery power can be a good infrastructure in your crash plan. Ultimately, knowing how extensive of an infrastructure you need depends on the demands of your website and how impaired business and revenue will be when faced with downtime. The first step to assessing this is to analyze the cost of downtime to business operations.
Hosting
Make sure to choose a host with quick support and configuration options. Ask questions and see how prepared they are to handle downtime of your site and resolve it quickly. Feel free to test them out too. Check their backup procedures by adding something to your website and then deleting it, and then asking them to retrieve it for you. If they cannot or it takes longer than a half an hour, you should consider a different provider.
In general you need to figure out exactly the service that you need and who can best provide you with that service. Perhaps the answer will be to not put all of your eggs in one basket. Going with a dual hosting option can be a really good move to ensure that your site isn’t crippled by a single point of failure.
Monitoring Service
It is unlikely that you are watching your website at every waking moment, and neither is your hosting company. If any downtime at all jeopardizes your business, you need to include a monitoring service in your crash plan. This company will email you as soon as anything happens to your site, so you know about it and can resolve an issue as soon as it occurs.
Communication Strategy
Have a communication strategy in place. Make a “to call ” list if need be. First point of contact will be your host company. Then, call your IT emergency contact: this can be in-house, a consultant, etc. Cover all of your bases. Finally, especially if you are a revenue based website, you will need to notify your customers. Try to inform them of how long you expect the downtime to be and update them on the status of the site periodically, when the outage persists for an extended period of time.
What is also smart is to include in your crash plan is a static page, which is a customized brand page that displays on your website when it is down, instead of visitors being directed to an error page. Most web host providers can offer this service.