Can You Really Make Your Website Bulletproof?

In light of Hurricane Sandy, we have to ask ourselves one simple, straightforward and honest question – can you really bulletproof your website from downtime 100 percent of the time? Yes, disaster recovery plans are crucial. It’s always a good idea to keep a backup copy of your website. Yes, you can indeed take measures to avoid downtime (as we’ve discussed the past few days). The truth is, however, that there are just times when you can’t actually do anything to prevent website downtime.

When Devastation Hits

The fact of the matter is that some website owners had more important things to worry about when Hurricane Sandy hit. With widespread power outages, flooding and other life-threatening disasters to deal with, website uptime may not have been a priority for some – and that is completely understandable. After all, there are those once-in-a-lifetime disasters that test the limits of the human race. Hurricane Sandy was one of those for some of us. There were others, however, who were sitting in other parts of the nation with websites going down and their main concern was getting those websites back up again. Those were the people who our advice was directed towards.

Keeping All Things in Consideration

It is important to remember that there may be a time when your website is going to be down and there won’t be a thing you can do to stop it. A major earthquake or a flash flood that wipes out your website’s server and affects your home town is going to be one of those times. With that being said, when you are safe and sound in your home or office and your website goes down, Alertra will notify you about the event and it is then that you can put your disaster recovery measures into place. This is the time when you utilize backup hosting, social media and other tools to keep your customers in the loop.

Of course when it comes to disaster recovery plans there has been a lot of advice going around the past few days. You may be reading articles or advice telling you to implement $100k+ disaster recovery plans. Let’s face it. If you’re a start-up company or a mom and pop website that nets less than that in a year, that’s really not feasible. The tools we have directed you towards are much sounder on an economic level and are affordable to almost every website owner. If someone is telling you that you need to implement a disaster recovery plan that is going to cost you thousands of dollars a month or eat up half of your website’s profits, they really don’t understand all of the tools available to you. A Facebook page, for example, is completely free. Twitter accounts don’t cost a dime. There are free and affordable ways to stay in contact with your customers if you do experience website downtime. And if Facebook goes down and Twitter goes down, both at the same time, no one is likely to expect your website to be available when the giants can’t even guarantee uptime during that period.

The Human Race Has Not Lost Its Compassion

Your company’s reputation isn’t going to take a dive if you’re offline for a couple of days due to a disaster like Hurricane Sandy. If you’re a small start-up company in the line of a devastating storm, no one expects you to be able to face the fury of the storm head on and come away without any website downtime. If you can’t communicate during the downtime, your customers will understand there are reasons for it. The important thing is to begin communicating as soon as you can and keep your customers in the loop in regards to what is going on and how soon your site will be available.