Crash plan checklist for your website.
Quoting CTI; 94% of companies that experience severe data loss do not recover. 51% of these companies close within two years of the data loss. 43% of these companies do not reopen again. 70% of small firms go out of business within a year of a large data loss incident.
The statistics above alone give you all the reasons why you need a crash plan for your website. What is a crash plan? why is it important to have one? Just like a crash test is performed on cars to determine loopholes that need to be fixed, a website crash plan will help identify your website’s vulnerabilities and a preventive measures checklist in case of an incidence.
Consider the strategy checklist below that might just save your business.
1. Backups
We know how important backups are and have the necessary steps to ensure we provide backups. We provide free remote backups for the entire cPanel account including website files, databases, emails, cron jobs, SSL certs and DNS zones. Taken twice a week, you can easily download the backups from your cPanel and restore to your account. We also have additional backups for all your databases taken daily with 7days retention. We have more backup options and a team that can advise more on the same.
Even with our backup options, it is also your obligation as a client to ensure you have an updated backup of your own. This, of course, is to ensure that there is no chance that you will lose everything and start afresh. Moreso, we encourage clients to keep backups because after your service expires, we only give 45-days grace period, after which your files are terminated from the server. Your backup could help you if you decide to re-activate the service.
2. Response
One very important strategy in your crash plan checklist is your response time. Example, if you deleted something important from your website one month ago and report now asking for restoration, it will be too late. Our backups are incremental, hence you might not get very old backups as we have scheduled them to run as often as possible.
Ensure you contact our support team at your earliest convenience so that your backup can be restored early enough if you don’t have an alternative backup stashed somewhere.
3. Monitoring
From experience, you don’t upload a website and leave everything to your web host. The truth is we deal with thousands of websites and we are likely not to notice any changes made. You have to be actively involved even if your web designer is the one who does the updates on your website. A good practice will be keeping a manual note of every change made on your website. You could also take screenshots of the same if that’s easier. This makes it better when explaining what was there on the website, the changes that were made and the problem you are experiencing.
4.Handling outage
What happens if you wake up in the morning and your website is throwing an error? Don’t panic, give us a call or take screenshots of the error messages and share with support@hostafrica.com.
Don’t attempt to resolve an error if you are unsure of what it means as you could make it worse. Contact our technical team on the email above.
For the sake of your customers, notify them that you are experiencing a problem that you are working tirelessly to resolve and keep them updated on the progress.
5. Hosting options
You can count on us! Our drive is to provide secure, reliable web solutions and we don’t stop until we offer you a solution. Our technical and support team members are available to help you resolve any issue you might encounter.
There are a lot of options when it comes to web hosting and the type of plan you choose matters most. Whether shared, VPS or dedicated hosting, it’s important to consult with our team so that they can help you identify the perfect package and other important add-ons such as SSL certificates, backups etc. This will reduce any chances of a possible data loss.
With the 5-list -items shared, you can use them as a checklist to verify and identify whether you are ready in the event of a downtime or damages to your website. Better safe than sorry!
