Data security: what happens if you lose your website?
A website is essential for all businesses, and customers expect to be able to email you too, so what happens if disaster strikes? The extreme weather we’ve seen on both sides of the Atlantic can deal a devastating physical blow to website businesses, and the economic downturn has had its casualties, too.
As the Superstorm Sandy cleanup continues on America’s east coast, homes and businesses are counting the cost. The direct hit on New York caused online chaos as hosting servers were flooded or taken down by power failure. Online publishing giant the Huffington Post lost its website early on the morning of 30th October and didn’t manage to reinstate the service for almost 7 hours, but still managed to communicate with its users and keep them updated with news of the storm.
How did they manage this? They made the most of social media to disseminate information minute but minute, and set up an interim website. Three pages of news statuses were posted between 5.39am and 12.07pm that day, keeping people bang up to date and allowing the business to continue broadcasting news when the news was happening all around.
What can you do to protect your site?
We spoke to Tom Yates at Orchard Hosting about data security:
“It’s simple really – don’t put all your eggs in one basket. If a disaster struck, you don’t want to lose your site and all your data. At worst, you should at least keep regular backups of your site locally, at home, anywhere other than the data-centre, just so you know you have a copy. At best, you should use a distributed “cloud” service which hosts your site on shared resources spread over multiple geographical locations, that way if disaster struck one datacentre, your site should still be accessible from another. Luckily, the second option is becoming affordable to everyone, not just larger companies.”
We may not be in the path of many hurricanes here in the UK, but we’ve seen some businesses cleaning up their online presence after the economic equivalent: the demise of website companies. If your domain name has been supplied as part of a website build package, and for any reason the original owner is unable to renew the registration, then there is a real danger that your website and email addresses will be lost.
Who controls your website?
The best way to protect yourself is to understand who owns your company’s domain. Check yours now – search and click on the ‘WhoIs’ option to check the registry details. This will tell you the registrant, the registrar (which is your hosting provider), and the expiry date for the domain name registration. The registrant is the only person who can renew the domain! To stay in control, transfer the registration to you and make sure your contact details are up to date. There is a small fee, but it’s worth it!
Here at Galia Digital, all our clients are asked to register their own domains and set up the hosting agreements directly with our recommended supplier – this simple step protects you and gives everyone peace of mind.
What can you do if your developer didn’t do this, and there’s a problem? Tom continues:
“Too many times I’ve had people ring me up saying that their hosting was put in their developer’s name, and now they’ve fallen out and their site is offline, and how can they get their site back? Well they can’t, the developer owns it if it’s their details. In situations like that, the only option is to speak nicely to the developer and see if they will transfer the ownership. If this fails they should first contact the domain registrar listed in the whois search, and if that fails contact the authoritative body. Each type of domain has a different authority – for .co.uk domains, this is Nominet, , and for .com/net domains, it’s ICANN.”
Stay safe – and keep building your business online.