Website Recovery – Help! Our Website has Disappeared

Websites transcend national boundaries, and by creating one, you proclaim your international presence and establish the credibility of your business. Such an interface assumes great significance if global expansion is in the offing. A website is your shop, which is open 24x7x365.

However, your developed website will work for you, only if you take care to maintain it well, for websites might crash and are susceptible to go out of service.

A Website Crash

Faulty designing commonly causes website failure. Flashy designs take long to load and visitors dislike waiting. Wrong colour combination, is another mistake. It is preferred by many, for the dramatic effect it creates, but it makes content reading difficult. Some entrepreneurs spend a lot on web designing, but fail to adhere to customer requests. Dissatisfied customers rarely come back. More than 9 out of 10 websites thus disappear into oblivion. On the other hand, some websites are so popular that they crash under the load of a surge in internet traffic.

Internet traffic or its absence is not the only problem that plagues websites. Malevolent intending people might make your site function inefficiently (temporarily or permanently.) This is called ‘a denial of service attack.’ (DOS attack is an attempt to make a website inaccessible to computer users.) One technique they use is inundating the targeted site by so many requests that it becomes impossible for the victim to respond properly.

Hackers might also target your site. They hack a website using 'Structured Query Language' (SQL is a language used by many website databases) injection. Hackers add their own SQL to the SQL of your website and gain access to confidential information or even delete data that keeps your web functioning.

Human error is another factor that fails websites. Delay in renewing the domain name of your site registered with an ISP, might lead to a lapse of the domain name. Sometimes, people make a few changes in their web content and accidentally depress the wrong keys, thereby deleting their website. Apart from these, websites can go out of service when there is a server failure that destroys site files, an abrupt closure of the web hosting company or any other miscellaneous reason.

Web failures might occur due to a number of reasons. It is, therefore, important to formulate a website recovery planning, to minimise your business loss.

A Website Recovery Planning

About 33% of the medium-sized British firms do not have a website recovery plan and less than 40% of those who do have a plan have not tested its validity more than once a year.

When you prepare a website recovery planning, it should be comprehensive enough to analyse the risks not only at your own personal location but also those of your server location. You must ensure that your host server has redundancy backups.

More than 7 out of 10 British midsized companies carry out their business operations through their websites. Any failure of the web endangers business. When faced with a disaster, you can also seek the services of companies that specialise in website recovery. They recover website text and images that are no longer available on the web browser.

Though there are plentiful of companies that are ready to help you out, it is necessary to create a backup for the data in your website that consists of content and graphics. It is also necessary to create a reserve copy of the entire website and, in case of a disaster, you can restore the data to a new server. You can create a backup in any data storage media or avail the services of a readymade web hosting backup software.

Websites are important. If you have not yet created one for your company, the following figures might motivate you into action. The ‘Trade association Interactive Media in Retail Group’ projected that online sale in the UK in July 2007, increased by 80% over the same month the previous year touching a figure of £4.2 billion.