5 essential tasks to minding your online business

Did you miss me?  I sure missed me.  I was down for at least 130 hours — over five days.  (Not that I was counting or anything.)

Why was I down for this long?  It would be easy to blame my web hosting company or blame lousy customer care, but I'm not going to do that.  Ultimately it doesn't matter.  As an owner of an online business, I am responsible for making decisions on every part of the engine that comprises the business, including choice of web hosting, choice of domain hosting, choice of scripts to run the website, and choice of who I partner with.  I am also responsible for assessing where my business is in terms of its growth, and adjusting my decisions about how to run the business based on that assessment.

With all of these choices, there are tradeoffs to be made between quality of service, flexibility, and cost.  Four years ago, I starting this website using a $10/month web hosting service, which is an entry-level hosting service.  (Actually, at the time, it was free for the first year.)  I registered the domain through my hosting provider, and got a good deal on it (under $6/year) because it was registered through the hosting package.  At the time, I saw no reason to get anything more than this, because it was already way more hosting than I needed.

Fast forward four years.  I'm still using that same $10/month hosting package, but since then I've pointed eleven domains to that web space, and it's the only web space I've got.  Five domains are internal to the package, which means they're tied to it.  Lots of eggs in this one basket.

For most of that time, things ran very smoothly.  Very little downtime that I noticed, and the issues I had with the hosting were dealt with pretty quickly.  Then, last Wednesday, I set up an SSL certificate that was part of the package.  About the same time, my sites went down.  All of them.  None of the websites could be found.  This happened Wednesday afternoon.  I called in the problem Wednesday night when I found out about it.

I called the hosting provider over a dozen times during the course of the next five days.  I spoke to an administrator once (someone who has unrestricted access to the servers).  The other times I didn't get past customer support, who each time dutifully informed me that the problem was being taken care of.  In the meantime, I received messages from other bloggers wondering if I was still alive.  More worrisome were the messages I got from advertisers, wondering why the heck my site was down when they were paying for advertising on my site.  The biggest one — one that comprises about half my blog's income — was hours away from pulling everything off of my site.  I informed them of the issues, but they replied, correctly, that it was not their problem that my site was down.  It was mine.

Thankfully, praise the Lord, the site came back up before the advertiser's spider crawled my site for the final time.  But I still have to explain to other advertisers what happened, and make amends with them.  Plus, the big advertiser will now be watching my site more closely, and expects it not to go down like that again.

So now that I've had this highly uncomfortable experience, what should I have done differently?

• Evaluate how much hosting you need.  Keeping a plan that is less that you need is penny wise and pound foolish.  This outage almost cost me hundreds of dollars per month in advertising.  As a website's income grows, the need to have a hosting package that will solve all of your issues quickly is absolutely essential.  Another blogger who helped me immensely with this situation has a very high-end package.  A tech picks up on the third ring, and problems like the one I had are solved quickly.  His hosting costs are about 5% of his websites' income.  Taking this as a benchmark, I should have considered a higher-octane hosting package long before now.  Less expensive hosting packages are fine for starter websites, but as uptime becomes more critical — and more costly in terms of lost revenue if it's not there — the higher-end packages are worth every penny in terms of peace of mind and the customer service you get when the chips are down.
• Register domains separately from your hosting package.  This outage wouldn't have been as bad as it was if I had all of my domains names in an account separate from my hosting package.  For six of my domains, I can point them wherever I want.  But for five of them, they only can point to my current hosting package (as far as I know).  This was a serious limitation.  If I needed to, I could have another hosting account waiting in the wings and point my domains over there, and bingo, my sites are back up.  When my sites went down this time, I couldn't do this.  So I just had to wait until they fixed the problem.  Even as it is, should I want to change hosts, I have to transfer the domains out of the hosting package, which costs money, and which is also contingent that I'm not at war with the host.  Overall, it's better to have domains registered separately from your hosting package.  It's more flexible.
• Have backups accessible from anywhere.  I'm currently visiting relatives, and my backups are on my home computer.  This does me no good now.  Whether it's an online backup system or a separate hosting package or a bunch of CDs, a current backup of my websites in my possession would have given me more options than not having them.
• Push customer service for you hosting package politely but firmly.  Even with a $10/month package, my coach through this emergency told me to keep their feet to the fire.  Frankly, it's of benefit to their bottom line to spend as little time with customers as they can but at the same time keeping them from going elsewhere.  At $10/month, I shouldn't expect the red carpet, but I shouldn't expect to get beaten either.  I'm generally too “diplomatic” and too “nice” when I should be firmer and a little angrier.  The fact that I got to speak with an admin at all was because I was advised to demand it.  If I hadn't demanded it, I doubt I would have gotten it.  As it was, even with the admin's name and extension, I had trouble talking with her on subsequent calls.  In a nutshell, no one cares for your business as much as you do, and if you don't, no one will.
• Ask for help and for understanding.  My blogging companions at the Money Blog Network had thought I had left without saying good-bye.  I responded by saying that I didn't think there was anything they could do, so I didn't bother them.  This was a mistake.  There was something they could do, and one of them helped me out quite a bit for a couple of hours.  Also, keeping advertisers in the loop, though it might not change the outcome of any extended outage, is better than nothing, and I got some good feedback from my biggest advertiser in the process.

Anyway, above all, I'm thankful to be up and running again.  Thanks for stopping by!