Holiday Troubles – hey ho!
I have always been told that running a one man show carried risks and that I was subject to 24/7 work and that Holidays were fundamentally off-limits if I ever wanted to take one. I was also told that when I take a holiday then all income stopped, no work, no cash… hmmm. It’s really not like that, because I am not on my own.
So: I took my holiday and here’s what happened:
- Day 1: A server at the data centre I use was hacked via someone else’s mis-configured website (not one of mine – I would note) the result was a small snippet of code was added to around 20 sites under my management.
This breach in security (because that is what it was) luckily caused no problems on 18 websites, but 2 were affected… I had to do a manual fix on them immediately. I do, of course, apologise to affected clients wholeheartedly, but the lesson here is that this was brought to my attention and fixed within hours even while on holiday.
- Day 8: Email outage – roughly half of all clients experienced an email outage – this is without a doubt the worst case scenario for clients, a whole afternoon of no email, but I was away on holiday.
Again I apologise to all clients affected wholeheartedly… but I have to add the issue was being worked on immediately it occurred and while it took longer to repair than usual it was at the highest level of priority through out the downtime.
I would like to reassure ALL clients that email and website issues are usually being fixed long before you or even I ever realise there is a problem, 24/7 365 days a year. The importance of your ‘hosted service’ is paramount to me.
- Internally Managed: you might be tempted to take control of email or even you website yourself… There is an optimum time to do this, usually when you have about 30 employees, the reason is you need dedicated internal support, but what if that person was on holiday, how stuck would you be then? Even leaving a list of user names and passwords with someone else may not be enough. How often have you been on the phone to a call centre when they have told you their ‘system is down’.
Internal Management is no more reliable and often harder to fix and much more expensive ultimately.
- Out-sourced IT support: A mid way point you might think, you can manage everything in-house, but when things go wrong you can call the guy in… but you could get all sorts of techie people coming into the office (or more usually dialling in) yes they will ultimately know what to do, but the operation carries an expense and if they have to come on site, it can take time and all sorts of other issues could arise.
Again, even for a 24 hour outage the additional expense required and the uncertain levels of service you might receive from out-sourcing have to be weighed up against the fixed rate, on-site service you get today.
- Back Up Email – I have always recommended clients have a back up email system like Gmail – if all else fails this can be used.
- Facebook/LinkedIn – Social Media – all these services allow you to directly contact me. If that is not a case of Social Media then I do not know what is. People are notified of messages directly on their phones… so even travelling I would be 100% contactable.
- Telephone – a couple of clients did manage to work out where I was, make the right contacts and unearth a Portuguese Land line and call me up… this seems to me to be time consuming and possibly expensive, it is not a route I’d recommend, but well done those who did.