Preparing for a Small Business Disaster
I recently tweeted the question ‘What is one mistake the webmaster’s often make?’ While my Twitter followers came up with lots of great answers, my dear friend Charles, who you may know on Twitter as @hawaiianshirts, came up with a fantastic answer. He asked what I would do if something happened to my website. In all honesty, I couldn’t come up with anything besides the word ‘panic’.
To get a little farther into the topic, Charles came up with the excellent post I am sharing with you today. This post really got me thinking about what would happen if I was no longer here. What would happen with my company? My website? Would my husband think to check? Heck, my poor darling doesn’t know how to check my email. The entire situation would be quite a nightmare, I’m sure.
Webmaster Disaster Preparedness for Small Business
In memory of all of the on-line small businesses that did not weather the storms; but with a little forethought, possibly could have.
Like many small businesses on-line you have poured every penny you could get your hands on into the business. As well as devoted hours upon hours of your time to get where you are today. Business is good, your brand has a following, and your family business is paying the bulk of your personal and operational expenses.
Yep, we have all done the Snoopy dance at one time or another. But lets bring in the evil thunderclouds and rain on your parade.
You awake one fine morning and find out that your business or ecommerce website is no longer online. Your money tree has vanished overnight; you think to yourself… what shall I do? The reality is that you’re in a complete state panic and you can’t think clearly at all.
Ok so you managed to calm down enough to make a call your hosts support department (that is providing they offer 24/7 support). The support technician finally answers and informs you that the RAID controller went out last night and IT is working on it. Whew, glad it’s a problem with the RAID controller and not my site. Even though you have no idea what a RAID controller is, you take the tech for his word and make the assumption that it will soon be fixed.
Minutes have now turned into hours and support is now telling you the repair is estimated to take a few days. Assuming you are financially dependant on your ecommerce site, you are now faced with some important decisions. I am willing to bet that very few SB have any idea what to do next.
That is why you need a Disaster Preparedness plan for your small business. Hint: Your first step is for you to go out and buy a tabbed notebook. Also keep in mind that my suggestions and comments below are not intended to be a business or site specific nor a comprehensive plan. But I do hope they make you give thought to this important, yet seldom talked topic.
- Your site is down and you have determined that you need to move to a new host. Time is money and researching prospective hosts can be time consuming. Do it while things are rosy, once you have decided on a backup host, write down all of the pertinent information in your book under the Hosting tab.
- Shipping API’s, what could go wrong there? I mean all those do is retrieve the shipping cost from the shipping service. Ok smarty pants, your pinging USPS during the holidays and their service is down for an unspecified time. Folks, you just lost your ability to make strong holiday sales. Without a shipping rate being returned, its most likely that your shopping cart wont allow the user to proceed and or close the transaction.
- One solution is to ready an API for a backup shipper. Some 3rd party carts have multiple shipping options so all you may need to do is pre-configure it, and then it’s just a flip of a switch. Regardless, note it in your notebook so you have a quick reference.
- Site management. If you’re like many SB you are probably the cook as well as chief bottle washer. If your stricken with an illness that lays you up for weeks, maybe even months, do you have someone that can fill your shoes?
You probably don’t, so it’s highly advised that you discuss this amongst those who will be impacted by your absence. In your site management section, document where, what and how the site is managed, as well as any passwords that may be needed, etc.
Don’t forget things like domain renewal, management of auto payments etc
- You give up the ghost in your sleep. Ok that’s certainly not my idea of an early retirement, but I could happen and does. I asked my wife Peggy what she would do in that situation, she so elegantly said she might place a for sale ad in the paper. I steered clear of the “its an Internet business” discussion and asked what the selling points would be and how she would conduct the transaction. Her response then changed to “I don’t know”. Well that’s an honest and respected answer because I don’t either. Is there such a thing as a website Realtor?
- Accounting. Well you may say that it has nothing to do with the actual website, indirectly it does. As Webmaster you’re probably in charge of managing your payment gateways and reporting features. In your notebook, document the critical processes as well as offer some insight on how to access them. If your temp bookkeeper is under the gun to file your estimated state sales tax and they can’t access the data, you’re in a heap of trouble.
- It’s all on your PC, what can go wrong there? I say anything and everything can go wrong with a PC. When your hard drive blows up just how do you plan on accessing all your important files? Answer, you don’t. So play it smart and buy a thumb drive with a fairly large amount of storage capacity. On it you can store a backup of your web, as well as important files and other information. Also if MS Outlook email is a key component of your business operation, make a copy of the .pst file and store it on your thumb drive. Microsoft’s .pst files have a size limit and once you hit it you will loose all core functionality and access to your local emails and settings. You will get no warning that its about to happen.
So that’s my short list for a Webmaster Disaster Preparedness plan for small businesses. Think about your own business, discuss with those concerned, and document an escape plan. It just might help you survive an otherwise cataclysmic web event
Mahalo
Charles Stankovich, co owner of Wave Shoppe Hawaiian Shirts
(On a personal note, Charles creates stunning Hawaiian dresses, shirts, and sarongs from fabric he has designed himself. They are truly beautiful, and worth checking out.)
May 27, 2009 at 11:04 am | Business | 11 comments
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
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P.S. – Sorry, forgot to tell you great post!
Fantastic presentation about Preparedness..
Acting as a Business person is always
beneficial.
Seems tragic so many
On-liners don’t Realize the Basic Foundations
needed to assure continued success in any Business.
Based on recent headlines neither do many
Off-liners ~smile~
Beside operating with a well designed Business plan,
it is important to develop Strong Mastermind Alliances
Chuck Bartok’s last blog post..Walnut Farming, Network Marketing, Growing Your Business Re-visited
Angie,
I just wanted to stop by and say how nice it was to “e-meet” you today. I look forward to sharing input with you.
Be well,
~John
John Melanson’s last blog post..What Happens To Your Business If You Die?
Thanks John!
Been a little absent from the forums this week, but I hope to get back there this week. Got hit with a few unexpected things last week.
All the best,
Angie
Most hosts allow you to create complete backups that include the databases, files, users, and email etc. Creating and downloading that backup should be a webmsters primary job. Site goes down, take the complete backup/move file open a new account at another host, restore your complete backup/move file, change your nameservers to point to the new host. That puts you back up and running in less than a day. All cPanel hosts I have dealt with allow you to create that complete backup/move file, I am sure there must be a Plesk and other web host control panel options that do similar things.
Backup, backup, backup!
LGR’s last blog post..WordPress 2.8 Released
I absolutely agree with you Lee. My trouble is remembering to do it on a regular basis
Always good to hear from you!
Angie
This just happened to me! My first and oldest blog – over three years old! – is now broken. And am I prepared? No. I’m still trying to figure out how to fix the bloody thing!
@Danielle – Oh dear! That’s not good. I hope you got it going again. That is an awful lot of work to lose!
Loved your post Charles (thanks Angie for putting it here) but worse things can and do happen to small business owners.
I have a small hosting business as a sideline but it brings in enough to make a difference, so when suddenly my inbox started filling up with emails from frantic customers whose sites had disappeared, I did what comes naturally I called the data center and asked !@#$%^ is going on.
“Minor problem” they said “Raid controller problem, we'll have them all back up in an hour”
Well the hour turned into five hours and that turned into a day and calls to the DC were useless, they were in total panic.
Seems that they had a redundant raid sysetem set up but they also had an automated backup system. But the failure was in the Raid controller card hence a total failure.
Worse still when the raid system went back online the first thing teh automated backup system did was to backup all the empty sites so that when it came time to restore them there was nothing to restore.
Long story short – I had to restore 59 sites from my local resources and from the programmers who had built them and in 11 cases build 11 very large sites from scratch.
No profit this year and quite a few unhappy customers.
So now I do my own daily backups of all the sites on my servers, keeping five backups of each on a dedicated hard drive, which is in turn backed up weekly to DVDs, which I put into a fireproof container.
If you have Cpanel on your site, you can do your own backups very easily with a little program called Backup Smart.