A proper Back Up Solution for Websites
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Now, it’s Christmas Time again, something like 25% of all eCommerce is taking place in these 3 fraught weeks and the impact across the Internet is under severe duress. When you read that Amazon Cyber Monday sales have risen from 2.3million orders last year to 3 million this year you know the Internet is picking up steam.
What then happens if you website goes down… As some of mine have done today… What do you do?
Most hosting companies have a 99.5-99.9% uptime agreement, but this invariably only covers you over a previous 30day period, but even at 99.9% that still leaves a possible hour per month of downtime, which at Christmas is critical. Couple this with the fact that most hosting companies only consider refunding a proportion of the fees you pay them… and that’s pennies these days.
I’ve encountered this problem ever since I started web design almost 15 years ago… the Internet is inherently not built for this… Let me explain briefly:
Your Domain Name maps onto an IP address that is assigned to a specific server/computer somewhere, there about about 9 computers around that world that control this mapping system, it’s complicated…
But in that single sentence you can see the issue, the IP address is assigned to a single server and that cannot be changed… mores the problem, if there is a problem with the server – you access it to alter the IP address. And because there are only a limited number of computers in the world that do this domain name to IP mapping it takes time for them to update, usually we call this propagation and this can take up to 72 hours to happen around the world.
These days you’re looking at propagation taking 2 hours minimum, but more usually 24 hours (or over night)… by them everything will be working properly again and any changes you made will have been pointless because you just have to change it all back.
The system is flawed.
There are other complications, especially with databases… you can effectively only have a one database being updated by your website at a time, changes made to it are not replicated in real time to another database… that’s a headache because now it means if you do revert to some sort of back system… the data you need is often not there.
The Solution
Launching an all new service at NComp@ss we’re going to make this story a thing of the past for you. We’re going to offer the ultimate back up solution so that this problem will never happen again. We not going to cure your host of their problems or change any SLA agreements, but we’re going to set up your website in such a way that in less than 10 minutes you can swap over your Website to a completely backuped up system.
It’ll be a manual request – it has to be, you will need to contact us and say – swap – but we’ll handle all the nitty gritty.
Roughly this is how it will work.
- You host your Domain Name with us on a specific DNS – where we can independently control where your website resides.
- Next we will back up your entire website – daily and fully, we will also back up your database. We will be able to set the frequency of this back up process, for example you might want the database backed up every 30 minutes
- A third layer of back up can be requested if required.
- Unlike hosting companies we will have access to multiple host, DNS services, your actual website and any other tools we might need.
- Back up email will be available as well if required or effected.
Happy Christmas Shopping.