WWW Easy Start

If you run a business online – you almost certainly need a web hosting account.
That usually means relying on another business to provide you with a service – and as is the way of the world, that’s where problems can start and become disasters.

Why am I writing about this today?
Well I use Mattie Blaze hosting for a number of my domains – most on auto-pilot that I rarely touch.
More than a week ago they had a problem and in their wisdom raised a ticket in their system (where I never look) and sent an email to my msn account (that got trapped in spam because they had never sent one there before) then suspended my hosting account – along with 50 websites!

As if that wasn’t bad enough, I have spent the past 24 hours playing ticket ping-pong with them and still don’t know if and when my sites will go live again. Yes they might well have had a problem with hackers – but killing their customers business is a good way to kill their own long term business.

Unfortunately Mattie Blaze are not alone in shooting first and asking questions later.
Lucking I use several different companies for hosting and my latest activity is on a different account.

To run any business, you need a measure of control over key processes – and the only easy way to get this control is by using redundancy. Expect things to go wrong one at a time – then at least you’re not dead in the water when it happens (it’s just too expensive for most businesses to plan for two problems at the same time).

Like any good businessman, I try to learn lessons when things do go wrong – so that I can make plans to mitigate similar problems in the future.
What lesson did I learn from this latest hacking episode?

That I should monitor my sites more frequently and be prepared to simply point my nameservers at a different hosting account – so that I have at least the option of restoring backups and getting sites live again within hours rather than a stressful indeterminate amount of time – at the whim of a service company with other problems and priorities.

I am a member of a number of groups of online marketers – and getting domains or hosting accounts hacked seems to be getting a more regular occurance. So if you think it isn’t likely to happen to you – maybe you might like to reconsider?