Crash! The Web Hosting Company from Hell

Beware: Even in cyberspace, what goes up, occasionally comes down.

What's that? Gravity in cyberspace?

That's right. Many entrepreneurs in cyberspace are quickly re-learning Newton's law of gravity. But this time around it's not an apple falling, it's their web site.

As a long-time veteran of cyberspace I had nearly forgotten the consequences of a fallen web site. Recently, I had the occasion to experience this nightmare and learn the valuable lessons that accompany it.

If you think it can't happen to you, think again. (Many of my woes were avoidable, but I got sloppy. (I promise to explain how YOU can learn from my mistakes in a minute .)

You see, like many of you right now, I thought I was safe. I went with one of the larger web hosting companies. They promised daily backups. They promised 99% uptime - even guaranteed it.

Promises are made to be broken...

My 1000+ page site, bizweb2000.com, the source of 100% of my small business income, crashed. When it is down, my income stops. I now know how cold and lonely cyberspace is when your web site is dead. Not only are these times lonely, lengthy periods with a dead web site can be very costly.

Take it from me. The grand tally from my recent outage totaled well into thousands of dollars in lost revenue. Not a big deal for a large corporation, but for a home-based business like mine, it's a figure not to be taken lightly.

But could I really have avoided it?

Maybe it was just a little bad luck? After all, downtime comes with the territory. Outages in cyberspace are far from uncommon and there will certainly be more in the future. If I could have avoided any of this bad fortune, I certainly would have, right? But my own computer was fine. The crash occurred at my web hosting company, er, that is my former hosting company, but I'll get to that.

The fact is, I could have done something before it was too late, but I didn't!

I AM to blame, just as much as anyone else involved. And when YOUR web site crashes and stays down for long periods of time, it may be YOUR fault too! Let me explain...

First I'll tell the tale of my little nightmare, then, I'll reveal the steps YOU can take to avoid such a debacle.

Note: For the record, I will not reveal the name of the hosting company that brought me to my knees. If you MUST know, drop me a line personally. It is not my intention to hurt their business, however badly they wounded mine. I'll admit that it was tempting, but malicious intent is not my style and the purpose of this article is to help you, not hurt them.

Anyway, it all started a few months ago. I noticed that I was not receiving my normal volume of email one day, so I sent myself a test message. Sure enough, my bizweb2000 email addresses were dead. I promptly emailed support at my hosting company and a day-long wait ensued. After hours of silence, I called them. "It should be working now" they said. "It's not," I replied. So they "took another look" and it finally started working an hour or so later. No message or call from them, just silence. I chalked that up as just a fluke. I was wrong.

A few weeks after that incident my email addresses went dead again. In addition, I had recently been notified that my allowed 1 gig of transfer per month had been surpassed and my monthly fee would be tripled. Since I was far from thrilled with the support and I was now paying a premium price, it made sense to look elsewhere.

After much research, I finally located a support-based web hosting company where I would move my site. What I did NOT do was transfer my domain and web site to this new host right away. I was going on vacation for a week and figured I'd do it when I got back. This was mistake #1. Had I gone ahead and transferred it before I left, I wouldn't be writing this right now. But here I am.