We do a ton of work on the Websites we design. From the thought process behind the design and the search engine optimization of the verbiage, every part of the site is thought out first before we even design it. Then comes choosing the right photos and other elements to make the site look great and be intuitively easy for people to navigate. And afterward, doing all of the SEO work to bring people to the site.
The problem is, that quite often business owners don’t want to spend the extra money for maintenance or backups and recovery. And that’s a mistake, especially in today’s world, because the statistics for hacking are absolutely ridiculously high. But aside from hackers, you also need to worry about disaster recovery in terms of natural disasters and technological ones. Because your website data is one of the most important pieces of intellectual property you own, and sooner or later, you’re going to be in a situation where you’re at risk of losing some or all of your data. It could be a machine error, a virus, a hacker, or a hurricane like Irma or Harvey last year. Actually, a website data disaster could be as simple as. . . oops you didn’t see those three emails GoDaddy sent you about renewing your hosting, and now your site has been taken down and they have no backup and so you may just have to start from scratch. We get calls from potential customers about that all the time and often there is nothing that can be done at that point.
We all know the cliché “Time is money,” but in the digital age, a much more apt cliché would be “Data is money,” and as such, you need to protect it, and here’s why: The loss of your website result in the loss of invaluable content, reputational damage, business disruption and it may have financial repercussions.
Imagine waking up in the morning to your email being overloaded with messages that your website is down. Consider what your customers use your website for and even more importantly, what your “potential customers,” need it for. When your website is down, people can’t even check to make sure you’re a legitimate business. It used to be that people handed you their business card and you immediately gave some credence to the fact that they were in business. But nowadays, we all immediately Google a business on our phone to see reviews, read testimonials, look at what services are offered etc. Heck, most of us look up a company’s website just to find the phone number to call for service or an appointment or the address to go to it. If your website is down, potential customers really can’t find you, and worst of all, can’t really verify for themselves, whether or not they want to do business with you.
Let’s use a comparison almost everyone can relate to. Everyone has a spare tire in the trunk or strapped to the underbelly of your vehicle. Most of the time, we just forget it’s there, but having it there let’s you drive around without fear of getting a flat tire, because you know it’s there as your safety net. You can think of a website backup and recovery service in the same way. They are your safety precaution for your website. Because a good hacker gains access to your website, they could overwrite or remove your files, corrupt them, use your email system to send out bogus emails and more! No matter what security tools you have on your website, the risk of being hacked is never zero percent. If it does happen, even the best website security platform won’t be able to restore lost data or replace missing content without you having a backup solution in place. Once files are overwritten or replaced, there’s no way to recover them without having a backup of the original ones.
With backup, you can keep a complete and almost to the minute/ hour/ day/ week/ month updated version of your website that can be recalled (and restored) by a simple click. Backup solutions make a complete copy of the website files and your database so that the website owner or developer can restore their website to the state it was in right before it got hacked or right before the data was lost.
Here at Visitivity Inc. we offer a very reasonably priced monthly backup service. Please give us a call to implement it for your business and keep your website safe and secure. Call us at 239-878-4641.
Social Web