Better safe than sorry…

Just how secure is your website? I hate to sound like a doom-monger but let me ask you a question, if the server that your website is on went down permanently or was irreparably damaged, what would happen to your website? Not sure? Statistics suggest that 60% of businesses that rely on their website for business leads and sales fold within 6 months of their site going down. Chances are you’d lose at least part of the site and you’d be faced with the possibility of having to rebuild that section from scratch, if not the whole website. The other consideration is your website back end. If your site is an e-commerce website or you have CMS control on the website then you have a database that controls those functionalities. What would happen to your business if you were to lose all or part of those databases?

You’d be right in thinking that you probably have a level of back-up provision as part of your website hosting package. However, restoration of your website or individual files cannot be guaranteed should any data loss or corruption occur. In addition, as part of hosting terms and conditions, many hosting server providers do not accept liability for any loss or damage to data stored on their servers.

Now I’ve really put the cat amongst the pigeons I should reassure you that the sort of catastrophic breakdown I’m referring to above is both a very rare occurence and unlikely to happen. However, aren’t the ‘unlikely to happen’ things the very things we insure against in everyday life? Fire, flood, severe illness etc are all things that we can cautiously hope to avoid but we insure against their potentially devasating effects all the same.

I think you should view your website in the same way as you would your home when taking out buildings insurance, in the fervent hope that you never need claim. It is possible to put in place a system by which your website is backed-up in full, independently of the server it is hosted on, on a daily or weekly basis. This means that, should the worst happen, there is a complete copy of your website ready to be re-uploaded, helping you to get back to business as usual quickly and with the minimum of hassle.

If you’d like to talk further about insuring your business against potential website failures then please just give me a call on 01428 722990 or email me at zoe@mzuridesign.co.uk