If you are worried about your websites and where they are hosted in case of a major storm such as those we had during the 2005 Atlantic Tropical Hurricane Season, then you are not alone. If your websites are hosted on servers in those areas you may be down for the count if all hell breaks lose and it is definitely something you should consider if you want to prevent these outages. It sounds like a nightmare scenario indeed. Many hosting companies guarantee this will never happen and have all sorts of back-ups to save the data. This is great but if your business is offline then it is often down for the count. Indeed the only way to totally be set up and ready is to have a mirrored set of sites all set up and ready to go, which are hosted somewhere else as well. If there is a total catastrophe then you have an option of turning on the back up servers hosting in a more stable part of the country and turning them on. Many companies do not consider such strategies up front and then it is too late. You must be prepared in advance to insure you will always be up. If not you are history when catastrophe strikes. If your sites are down too long you can lose your rankings in the search engines, all your customers will think you are out of business and then you will have to re-establish your in the market place. Even worse some folks may not trust you and therefore be leery of using your online services in the future. Consider all this in 2006. |
