Smallshock

A friend of mine contacted me the other day looking for a web host. His current designer/web host was moving to another field and he needed to house his web site somewhere. Shortly after, his site was victim of an attack which cleaned out his database.

His content was removed from each page, yet leaving his design untouched. Fortunately, his designer had a backup of the database, and was able to quickly restore it during the transition to a new web host. But I know there are others who haven’t been so lucky.

Do you know who backs up your web site? If you have a contract with your web designer (and you absolutely should!) then the delegation of that duty might be in the wording. Ultimately, the responsiblity falls with you.

Here are some helpful tlps for ensuring you’ll have a backup of your web site, or at least major portions of it, when you’ll need it most:

• Make final payment for the web site contigent on you getting all the graphic and web files from the designer.
• If your web site is database driven, such as with a content management system, have the webmaster of the site e-mail you a backup of the site’s database each month. Worst-case scenario, you’d at least have the database and the web site files to take to a new webmaster to get you up and running again. Having the database e-mailed to you monthly might cost you a small fee, but it’s well worth it, especially if your relationship with the webmaster sours.
• Save copies of the web site yourself either through your web browser or other site copying tools. Every browser allows you to save individual (and in some cases, entire sites) to your computer. Other tools available will help you make a copy of your entire web site.

Don’t be unprepared for a web site outage. Having regular backups of your data and site design will save you plenty of headaches when disaster strikes.