During a lunch break a while ago, I was watching Sky Sports News when a line appeared on the screen that said:
Ross County unable to sell tickets online for match with Celtic because club’s website was accidentally deleted
I laughed. Who’s done a thing like that? I wondered. How do you accidentally delete a website? Who’s in charge of it? How did they do it?
I Googled it…and all was revealed: it wasn’t an error on the part of the person whose job was to look after it. It was an error by the hosting company – either technical or human – that had wiped out lots of companies’ websites, not just Ross County’s.
I quickly made sure all the sites that I look after had some sort of back up and restoration facility in place (they did).
Although Hostgator, my hosting company, have never given me an ounce of trouble in the ten or so years I’ve used them, if they made a change that wiped out one or more of my sites – or, worse, a client’s site – I need to be covered.
It’s worth backing up data, documents and files in three different places – your computer’s harddrive, some cloud-based storage, via emails, an external harddrive, your phone…wherever.
Don’t leave things to chance and hope.
