On March 10th, there was a massive fire at a Data Center in France. You may not have heard about it, or if you did, maybe you didn’t think it had any impact on you or your business.
With information and data being global, an event like this very well could have a significant impact on your business.
This specific data center is owned by OVHcloud, a Global Cloud Service Provider. Companies worldwide stored data in their buildings.
Luckily there were no physical injuries to anyone from the massive fire. Here are just a few of the immediate impacts seen across the internet:
- Millions of websites went down.
- Many were in Europe and some were Government sites
- Email service went down
- Weeks or months for some data to be restored
- Some data was lost forever!
While I don’t know much about computer gaming, there were irate customers online fuming over lost data. Some of their data was a total loss.
The fire took websites and emails down across the globe, but Europe was especially hard hit and it happened during Fashion Week in Paris. Talk about bad timing for those businesses where Fashion week is the biggest week of their year.
What Can Your Business Learn From This?
Are you depending on your website host to backup and store your backups? This isn’t a good practice.
Imagine if your website host was on one of the destroyed servers and you wanted to move it to another host to get your website back online faster. Do you have a current backup that would allow you to do this quickly or did their server have the only copies of your website’s backup?
This was a fire, but natural disasters can happen that could cause similar or worse damage.
Back up your data and then back it up again!
Don’t forget about website hackers. In 2018 an Australian website hosting company was hacked and the company lost their client’s website data and backups!
This means you need to not only have backups but you need off-site backups.
This fire is a good reminder to look at your business’s security and backup systems. The last thing you want is for your website to go offline without a backup system in place.
Your website maintenance schedule should include:
- Daily security scans and malware cleanup
- Daily reliable off-site backups
- Weekly software (WordPress) and plugin review and updates if available
As you can see, maintaining a website isn’t easy, it’s time-consuming and has various technical aspects to get it right.
Do you have a maintenance schedule for your website? Grab a chat with me and let’s see how I can help.
Content on this site may contain affiliate links for which the author receives a commission if a product is purchased through the link.