Web Site Insurance

As a business owner, you have insurance to protect your business - insurance on your building, equipment and even on liability. Like your building, a Web site is subjected to experiencing downtime through no fault of your hosting company, but Web site insurance is not yet available and probably never will be since it's nearly impossible to put a price tag on business lost while your site is down. The price for such insurance, if it were available, would probably be beyond most small business owner's reach. Consider the number of factors that can bring down your site: power outages, acts of God (tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes), malicious hackers, viruses, buggy software, and worn-out or defective equipment. So what do you do?

Redundancy
First step we recommend is to have a redundant site. An exact duplicate of your current site with a different domain name. Should your main site go down for an extended period of time, you could switch your current domain to your backup domain and the switch should take no more than 36 hours - usually 24 hours.

To ensure that both sites don't go down, we recommend that you have them with different hosting companies, not just on different servers at the same hosting company, and, preferably the hosting companies should be in different geographical locations. You don't want to have two hosting companies in California, for instance, only to have them both affected by an earthquake or wild fire.

Build Traffic
You cannot, nor should you, build traffic to your backup site using the search engines and natural placement. This puts a lot of strain on the search engines' database size if they need to keep 2 sites indexed for each site owner. It's not fair, nor is it required. Instead, build traffic to your backup site using off-line advertising, Email campaigns, or sponsored placement programs like those offered by Overture and Google AdWords.

Having half your traffic going to one site and the other half going to the backup site means that you lose only half your traffic should one site go down. This is much more preferable than losing all traffic for a period of 24 hours or more.

Monitor your Sites
This is crucial if you are seriously promoting your site. What good is sending traffic to your site if it's down? Web-Kare orders a 24/7 monitoring service for all of our sponsored placement clients. If we get an alert that a site is down, we quickly suspend the sponsored placement ads and reactivate them when the site is back online. Most alerts show that a site is down for just a few minutes, but occasionally we get a site that is down for several hours - we check every alert to confirm the site is off-line, then react accordingly. The service we use checks all of our clients' sites every hour.

Be ready to move
If your site is going down frequently, or customer support is not giving you the assistance you need, start hunting for another hosting company. There are literally thousands of hosting companies and finding a good one is difficult. When you find a hosting company that is offering you the features you need at a price you can afford, check them out at online forums to see what others say about them. One forum that Web-Kare has found to be invaluable is http://www.webhostingtalk.com. There are other hosting directories out there, too, but be careful - some of these directories are self-serving - the recommended hosting companies actually own the site.

Check out the data center
If the hosting companies' site doesn't talk about their data center, you may be dealing with a reseller. Web-Kare is a reseller. We do not have our own data centers. Our clients come to us with problems and we contact the hosting companies to get them resolved. If that's the relationship you want, make sure your reseller is responsive to your problems. If you want to deal directly with the hosting company, be prepared to make a lot of noise. Most hosting companies consider a 24 hour response to your problem adequate and, since you only have one Web site with them, you're not likely to carry much clout with them.

Web-Kare offers the ability to host a backup site for you at an exceptional value and, if we're maintaining your site, we will update both sites whenever a change is made. We deal with the hosting companies on your behalf and will find you an alternative hosting company, should you need one.