Halloween Edition
a scary story!

Case of the Disappearing Website:
Is Your Website Properly Backed-Up?

Jason Roteck, eCommerce Entrepreneur

Don't depend on your host to have a backup of your website. Take possession of your site.

Is Your Website Properly Backed Up?

At a recent convention, we were promoting our site, roteck.com, to one of our “niche group” of clients. Very few people had heard of roteck.com going into the convention. As the week progressed, word got around about our products, and people were waiting in lines over 30 minutes to buy from us. Numerous people who were not able to wait asked if they could order from us online. We assured them that our online ordering was convenient and extremely user-friendly.

At the end of an evening, I went online to check on orders that we had received during the day. After I entered our web site into Internet Explorer, I was told the site could not be found. In order to make sure there wasn’t a router or ISP issue, I entered the names of some other sites I know are hosted by the same hosting company. They came up just fine. I then tried to ftp to my site, and that failed as well. I thought this was rather strange, but wasn’t too concerned. I e-mailed my host and asked them to look into it. I went to bed that evening confident the site would be back to normal by morning.

The next morning, I attempted to view my site. It was still down. I called support directly, and they stated both hard drives failed and were unreadable. This just happened to occur during the daily backup, so the tape backup was worthless as well. The support individual told me I could upload “my” backups and they could get the site up and running.

I was in total shock. Unlike most websites, 99% of my site is custom code - mainly written by me. Even though I was the author, all of the code was created and debugged online. Therefore, NONE of it was stored on my computer. I never thought my hosting service could destroy my backup in addition to the original. On top of it all, over 5000 people were made aware of our web site, and most likely would be checking us out online very soon.

Damage Control: Working with SitesbySean, we immediately got the site into a state that gave users a friendly message stating we were making major upgrades to our site, and gave them a date to check back. Since all of the images used by Roteck.com were created offline by SitesbySean and me, we were easily able to load those back to the server. The next step was to get all of the text pages back up and visual (i.e. about us, ordering, frequently asked questions...). Google.com came through for us in this respect. I found out that if you are able to get your site to come up in a Google search, you can click on “cached”. You’ll then see a snapshot of your web page from 3 to 6 weeks ago. After getting the basic pages up, I began to re-program all of the .ASP pages. After re-programming most of them, I realized Microsoft Front Page creates .TMP files which turn out to be your .ASP files when you view them. Utilizing this, I was able to re-create the site in roughly three days.

Having learned the hard way, I now have new procedures in place for protecting my work in Roteck.com. Every evening that I make changes to the website, I backup the entire site to a local PC. This PC is equipped with a dual 60 GB HDD RAID system. This system isn’t very expensive - the controller was $50.00 and the HDD’s were about $80 each. Once a week, I swap the secondary HDD with one located in a fire-proof safe. Once the second HDD is installed, the RAID updates the second HDD with the latest data.

In addition to the web site, most e-commerce sites have a database of some sort. In the past, we used an MS Access .MDB file for our database. Luckily, I need this file on a local computer to process our orders. Therefore, I didn’t lose any data from my database. During the site rebuild, I upgraded to an MS SQL server. Backing up this data automatically required a little bit of VB Basic programming. The SQL server data is backed up onto the RAID HDD’s every evening, and I re-name the files daily in the event the database becomes corrupt prior to my knowing about it. (You don’t want to erase your backup with bad data!)

While you may not choose to go to the extremes I have, I highly recommend that owners of web sites have a strategy in place for backing up and restoring data, since the disappearing site can apparently happen to anyone.

- Jason Roteck
www.roteck.com

Backup Your Site:

Please make sure that you have a local backup of your website, and that you have a regular routine for backing up your site's database. 

If you need help with a backup strategy, please email support@sitesbysean.com, and we will walk you through what you need to do.

If you'd prefer to just have us back up your site for you and send you duplicate versions on CD, we have organized a service to provide this for you:

• We'll provide two CDs for you to archive.
• We'll also walk your through how to make regular backups of your database

Cost: $50 for the first 50 MB + $0.75/MB thereafter.

Please contact support@sitesbysean.com if you are interested in this support option.

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