Ask yourself what you’re thinking if your website was not working and you didn’t hear about it. This can happen. Thats why you need a reliable web host. Let me tell you a true story about one such tragic incident I was recently made privy to.
Holiday Sounds Good
Imagine it’s christmas time. Your a business owner operator so you figure you’ll take a break, just a couple weeks. What a great idea!When your out of the country you avoid the phone calls – ah, very relaxing. Ignoring your checking of the emails. Your not using the internet while lazing around. You’re “OUT OF THE OFFICE”.
Your thinking; “I deserve some family time without interruption”.
So far so good – except for one thing. Your site was developed by a small internet hosting that enables your website. A problem occurs with your website just as you go on holiday, ironically only your single website is affected at the hosting company. Wow – your site has vanished completely. Ouch ouch!
My Website is Dead
However unlikely it is to happen his website is dead. You’re usually so comfortable (and naive) with your web hosting arrangement you don’t even set your home page to your site so you can check it. You wouldn’t know its down. Well our “ON HOLIDAY” business owner did not know, did he?
My Own Repeat Visitors
By the way setting the home page at your home computer at least means at least one person is “repeat” visiting your site and improving its ranking. If your children help with your company then add their visits, plus your computers then it gives you multiple locations and everyones usage adds up to scores of daily repeat visitors. And computer you have influence over must regularly come to your website. Great job and sincere congratulations for anyone using this home page monitoring system.
HINT: Would you notice your website had problems when your site is the homepage of many computers?
Critical Point of Contact
In business your website is the point of contact, right. As people need to phone you they use the details on your website. Long gone it the use of yellow and white pages. (Any reader out there remember the printed phone book in a public phone booth? You know the phone booth that you put coins into on the street corner.)
Now-days more and more business people depend on that web hosted point of contact. In our story the business person came back from holidays and was really puzzled. He was asking himself; is every one still on holidays because there were “NO PHONE CALLS”. Truly!
I was off the air for how long?
A the next week rolled by the urgency of staying in business related to no phone enquiries so no quotes leading to new work. What is going on?
We know its because he doesn’t know his website has literally vanished weeks ago. Away for some weeks. What are the potential oucomes our business owner if now looking at. With no incoming calls so there is no quoting and hence no work coming in. What do the search engines do. Well the sites is missing so the ranking of the site will suffer badly. When the site comes back will it instantly return to the great position it had. No! So there is a long term problem. A long term loss maybe several weeks, maybe even several months. So to recover our mister “OUT OF THE OFFICE” may need to spend money to re-establish his previously favourable search results. Wow, what a costly mess.
It could be worse, his site may have been lost without a backup, and more.
So how did this disaster end. Well after tracking down his “developers” at the internet hosting company its back up and running. Trying to find them was compounded with the curiousity they were also on holidays. Oh dear.
What Would You Admit
What when wrong we may never know. If you broke someone’s website would you honestly admit anything, admit that an employee was incompetent, or you had incompetent management and supervisory systems. No way. Could it be a faulty DNS server, a simple scheduled maintenance deleted some critical file. Some backup files were re-installed which was pre website. A software glitch, a computer had smoke coming out , a update that locked up and the site didn’ auto-restart after a boot-up.
Excuses Not Needed
In simple terms the hosting company can say things like: “We are not sure, but we will investigate this issue and get back to you. We’ll look into it to making sure it does not happen again, we can do some checking to find out what happened. It was weeks ago so looking into it can take time.”. No one will know what happened do you don’t sue and can’t liligate because its all a mysterious event. But the hosting company fixed it “real quick” after you reported the problem so they are great guys – ok.
In conclusion I draw you back to the ideas about making your computers HOMEPAGE work for you. SET YOUR SITE TO BE YOUR HOMEPAGE because its critical.
