Dealing with Disaster Recovery Options for Your Website

I’ve been out of pocket for awhile and I am compelled to share with you the reason why, the disaster that happened and the solution to the problem.

In a previous post I shared how disaster recovery of your website is a critical component to managing your business. As I mentioned then, the web host I have used for about a decade was purchased by another company and I immediately experienced problems with my websites. Several did not even come up on the web. It took a lot of work to solve the problem and I thought it was fixed.

Then just before the holidays, the web host was compromised and rather than fix the problem, they resorted to bullying not just me, but other businesses hosted on their servers by threatening us that they would deny us service.

At first I tried to work with them. It became a constant battle. I would fix the problem, they would send me more support tickets that there were issues and threaten me even more.

Eventually I had to completely delete a corporate website and replace it with just a picture.

The next step was to redesign, recreate, and relaunch the corporate website. This is an excruciating process but finally we had a new version of the site up and running.

What happened next

We spent weeks working with support as the new website was again attacked and trying in vain to determine what could be causing the problem.

A new tactic was needed so we searched the discussion boards and found out what was happening.

We were not alone, many veteran customers who had been with the web host were having the same problem. The new owners outsourced the support process and the support staff was measured on number of tickets and time to closing the ticket. So they didn’t spend too much time on them, they simply used the threatening technique and shut down many of their customer’s websites.

We also learned that many other businesses whose web sites were hosted with that company were receiving the same errors, issues, and tickets as we did.

An Epiphany!

Through our extensive research of the problem, we determined that their recommendation was to upgrade to a more expensive option. That would fix the problem, they said.

So this was a business decision, upgrade or spend all of your time dealing with issues they created.

The threats were their means of increasing revenues or driving away customers who signed up for their low cost option.

The Solution to This Website  Disaster

We knew what we had to do. Leave them. Find another host. Depart from this nightmare that had run for months.

So, we packed up all of our websites and moved them to another web host. We found the perfect solution to end the nightmare and moved away.

The disaster solution brought its own issues. First of all, it is time consuming and a delicate process. We had to research to find the best support, most reliable host, and we had to manage all the moving parts.

It took a few more weeks for it all to settle down, but finally we had found a new home.

Unlike the old host who were only available Monday through Friday during business hours (which stretched out the time to fix issues) our new host has full support.

We have a new host whose support is available 24/7/365 and not only that, the support staff is helpful, courteous, and excellent.

Now we are back on track. We will be posting more often, and provide new content.

If you are experiencing anything like this, let us know how we can be of help. We are now very experienced because of the time and effort it took to solve this problem for our own business.

Your comments are always welcome.