It doesn’t happen too often, but it does happen. I got a call from a new client today, “new” meaning as a result of this website downtime incident, they’re new hosting clients for us. He said their website had been down for two days and of 12 ISP locations around the country, not one of their phones will let you connect to a support person to find out what’s going on.

Seems to me I can remember a day a long time ago when something similar happened to someone I know…ME! Except the site never came back up. I had to dig through the ruins and figure out a way to go on. With no backup of my own, that single experience paved the way for everything that I would do online in the future.

Luckily, the hosting company today didn’t go out of business and pull the plug. And, we’ll have a backup of the files tomorrow when the site should be back in place.

My question is why does website downtime even happen these days? We’ve come so far with web servers with backups and server mirroring, that it just doesn’t make sense.

I don’t know the answer…but I DO know the question! Before selecting your hosting company, always ask them about their backup process and what happens if the server your web site is hosted on goes down? Is there another (mirrored) server that takes over the day while the other gets fixed? Or, is your site just down for the duration until the problem is fixed?