Whether you’re blatantly throwing money away on bad ideas or losing potential revenue by failing to capitalize on good ones, here are some surefire ways to make the least out of your investment.
There’s one very good way to ensure that you waste money on your website and that’s to avoid every opportunity to protect your investment so that one day, perhaps unbeknownst to you, your site is suddenly… gone. And why might that happen? That’s what this next stupid idea is all about.
Stupid Idea 9: Don’t Worry About Whether Your Site Or Database Is Being Backed Up
Your site is being hosted with a reputable provider. You have a copy of your site on CD in a wall safe. Things are running smoothly 99.9999% of the time. Pretty good odds until you hit that .0001%. It could be a virus or an intrusion, a hardware failure or human error, but the next thing you know your site is down (especially if you’ve opted for the cheap hosting and someone has hacked into your site, or one of your 100 FTP account holders has just accidentally overwritten your index file). If you haven’t spent the other 99.9999% of the time planning for such an eventuality, open your wallet and start throwing dollar bills out the window because you’ll need to start over – design, photography, copy, files, inventory, whatever you’ve just lost.
Backups are not for the 99.9999% of the time that things go right. They’re for the .0001% of the time that they don’t. Too many people consider backups a disposable expense. Even more people never consider backups at all. But do you want to be one of those people when the .0001% comes calling?
Think of backups the way you might think of car insurance. You don’t get car insurance for the likely event that you drive carefully and arrive safely. You get it for the unforeseen and unpleasant reality that disaster can strike no matter how careful you are.
Your website is an investment and you should take measures to protect it. Not only should every last one of your site files and assets be backed up but it should be done regularly and it should be done off-site.
Depending on your site, “regularly” can mean every week, every day, or every hour. If you have a heavily content-managed site with lots of people uploading and changing information or product inventory you may want to back up your site more frequently than, say, someone with a static informational site. Something as simple as one of your administrators accidentally hitting the “delete” button can cause disaster. Going to a backup to restore lost data is a whole lot easier and less costly than trying to remember and recreate what’s missing.
No matter what type of site you have – ten simple pages or ten thousand ecommerce pages – you should have at least one offsite backup plan. If your site is hosted on a server in your office basement and your backups are running on another server in the basement, it won’t do you much good when the basement floods or the building catches fire. All of your valuable data including site files, assets and database should be backed up safely where they can’t be affected by an untimely disaster. If you back up wisely you can meet disaster with a shrug instead of a huge outpouring of cash and the next six months in therapy.
What kind of backup plan are you implementing to protect your valuable site data?
Read More In The “How To Waste Your Money” Series
- Stupid Idea 1: Hire someone to do it “cheap”
- Stupid Idea 2: Fabricate an FAQ section
- Stupid Idea 3: Just start building the site
- Stupid Idea 4: Worry about search optimization “later”
- Stupid Idea 5: Believe the person who tells you they can “get your site to be number one in Google”
- Stupid Idea 6: Don’t pay attention to your domain name, where it’s registered or when it expires
- Stupid Idea 7: Get the cheapest hosting you can find
- Stupid Idea 8: Write the copy yourself
- Stupid Idea 9: Don’t worry about whether your site or database is being backed up
- Stupid Idea 10: Insist on a news section or blog
- Stupid Idea 11: Brush off social marketing as something that’s too hard/not relevant for your business
- Stupid Idea 12: Be too busy to study your analytics and decide it doesn’t really matter anyway
- Stupid Idea 13: Fall in love with Flash/Ajax/JavaScript/[insert cool technology here]
- Stupid Idea 14: Say “I don’t know” a lot
- Stupid Idea 15: Launch the site, breathe a sigh of relief and cross it off your to-do list
About Carol Lynn Rivera
