Backup

A client asks about yet another hosting option:

The VPS-2000HA-S includes the following resources:

6GB RAM (burstable)

150GB SSD Disk space

5TB Monthly Bandwidth

4 free dedicated IP's

At 12:27pm, our alerts started firing. Multiple ones -- website down, server down, secondary monitoring -- one of our client's servers had completely disappeared off the Internet.

This is why you want to be on our maintenance plans. Our number one priority is recoverability, from just about any risk. And today, we had a client that needed this, in a very bad way!

A past customer just called, with email trouble... suddenly their email had stopped delivering. This customer had been acquired by another company, and we had shut off their web hosting service months ago, as their website had been retired.

When choosing any service provider, a crucial question is, "What happens if something goes wrong?" When you're choosing a hosting provider, we like to dig a bit deeper, and ask what risks are likely to be an issue for you?

Here are some of our questions:

The short answer: Not Vulnerable.

We've been asked by several customers about whether they or we are affected by the recently discovered Bash ShellShock vulnerability. And to the best of our knowledge, we are completely unaffected.

How would losing your web site affect your business?
That might seem like a silly question, but a surprising number of small organizations don't think it can happen to them. Think again -- web sites get lost all the time, through a variety of means. The server hosting your site might have a hardware failure. Your site might get hacked. Your web developer might accidentally delete something critical. Your host might go out of business, leaving you stranded. If you're in the tech world, you hear about these incidents all the time.

All the planning and preparation in the world won't prevent an incident, but it can greatly reduce the consequences.
Nothing better prepares you for responding to disaster than experience. In the world of web applications, sometimes we act as firefighters, coming in to rescue the smoldering remains of a hacked site, a crashed server, or an unexpected traffic burst.

At Freelock, we don't think one backup is enough. All kinds of things can, and often do go wrong. Murphy was an optimist, after all.