Sorry about this rant... but it happened to me this weekend
and I feel I must.
Saturday morning, the first call came in.
"WHAT HAPPENED TO MY WEBSITE?" the client asked.
I went to their site and instead of the usual webpage;
there was a black page with a big headline DEFACED and a
photo of some warrior guy with a sword, there was even an
email left there.
We got hacked all of our own sites and many of our clients
who host through us. I use a 3rd party supplier for web
hosting and now I had no idea if it was just us or was it
ALL of their sites.
A call was placed to their support team which never
answered (just to add to the anxiety that was building at
warp speed).
Then I started thinking about this...
The hacker did this for no apparent reason other than ego.
To show he did it and even supply his email (I never
checked if it was a real email, that would probably make
him even happier if I emailed).
Christmas season on a Saturday, not good to have your store
closed. Not good at all.
What options did we have?
1. Find another hosting service that would take longer to
move everything over than it probably would to fix the
problem
2. Redirect everything to other places (assuming we did
have a secondary hosting account somewhere)
3. Cry
4. Scream
We opted to wait for our hosting service. Which (surprise,
surprise got to love techies) never phoned to update us
(emails were down as well that isn't a bad thing in my
eyes).
I ended up calling them again to get an update (this time
spoke with someone) and the hacker took down the whole
server and they were restoring it.
All said and done, 7 hours after we noticed it being down
it was back up.
Imagine if you are doing $50,000 a day during the Christmas
season!
Gone never to be recovered.
Plus the long term damage of the perception on your website
being down is beyond immediate measure.
So what can you do to avoid this?
1. Make sure your web host is a good one
2. You could have a backup hosting account with another
provider (and should, especially if you are doing high
sales volumes) for the extra $500 $1,000 per year, pretty
cheap insurance)
3. Move it all offline not that good of an option. Even
that is not fail proof as any number of things can go wrong.
I think the best route is to have an alternative hosting
account with a different supplier even have the majority of
your sites posted there so that, in the case of emergency,
you can redirect all your web sites to the other host.
Not good though big losses incurred by some and a definite
loss in faith with their service (7 hours to recover?).
This had very little to do with advertising... other than
the fact that your advertising costs would be a complete
waste if the site was down (we did have some ads running so
we have no idea how much was lost due to this either)!
It was a rant, but also a word of warning, have some form
of backup plan. It may never happen to you but WHAT IF it
did?
Think about it, it happened to us and it very well could
happen to you.
----------------------------------------------------
Troy White, The Marketing Results Mentor and Expert
Copywriter helps clients achieve HUGE growth surges in
their business in very short periods of time. He is a very
sought after marketer and advertising specialist who has
helped launch some of the world's most profitable marketing
systems. For more info visit White's site at
http://www.SmallBusinessCopywriter.com or sign up for his
Free Cash Flow Surge Newsletter at
http://www.CashFlowSurges.com
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