Hosting websites can be a thankless job. But it’s the occupation that we’ve chosen … not because we want to get rich quick, but because we love websites. Let’s face it, we host websites because we’re serious, uh…professional geeks. 
Given the state of the global economy, more than ever, hosting companies can not afford downtime. The market is saturated with hosting companies and if your clients encounter downtime, they’ll just hop to the next hosting company down on the Google search query.
Downtime is inevitable, given that our business is computers, networks, and electronics. Machines fail. It’s not a matter of if, but when. What I’ve discovered over time is that what’s most important during the downtime is how you handle it. Customers are typically much more willing to deal with a hosting company that is having technical woes as long as they’re kept informed as to what’s going on.
It’s time to put together an action plan for what I’m calling H-D Day…
Hosting Disaster Day
Scenerio #101
Sunday Morning. Your sitting in church when all of a sudden your pocket starts vibrating. You pull out your phone, tap over to your text messages, and there it is:
PANOPTA OUTAGE ALERT: SERVER-10 FAILED
Crap! You can’t escape, as the pastor just started delivering his message. You’re stuck in church and your shared hosting server has just crashed. What to do?!? Being the resourceful hosting company proprietor, you pull out your handy dandy smart phone and open up a trouble ticket with your hosting provider. Now that they’ve been alerted, how can you keep your customers informed?
If you’re like most resellers that I know, your website and help desk is probabley housed on the same server that all of your clients are hosted on. As such, since that server has failed, so has your help desk, email server, and website.
You’re down and out until your hosting provider gets you back online!
Prepare for failure, courtesy of ReadyWire!
1.) Sign up for failover DNS service from DNSMadeEasy. Don’t worry, if you’re on a serious budget, this service is only going to set you back about $20/yr (about $1.66/mo)
If your main hosting account fails, DNSMadeEasy will automatically direct your website traffic to another server, which happens to be ReadyWire’s server!
2.) Sign up for a FREE Network Status Backupaccount with ReadyWire Multimedia Solutions. As a courtesy to the website hosting community, ReadyWire Multimedia Solutions is pleased to provide the following service to any interested website hosting companies:
* 100MB of Disk Space
* 10 GB Of Bandwidth
* 5 free MySQL Databases
* 5 free email accounts
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Monthly Price: Free!
There are no strings to this offer. We only ask that you use this free hosting space as a backup to your main website hosting account. In other words, we ask that you only send traffic our way when your hosting account is unavailable. We’ll setup this shared account on a white labeled server, meaning your clients won’t ever find out about your relationship with ReadyWire! Let us mirror your main account or simply host a backup WordPress blog with us. It’s your choice! We just want to help you keep in touch with your customers.
What’s in it for us? Well, that’s simple. I hope that after using ReadyWire as your backup provider, you’ll quickly realize that you’d use us as your PRIMARY host. Of course, it’s ok if we never earn your full-time business.
If you’d like to take us up on our offer, please send an email to sales @ readywire.com and make reference to this blog post. We’ll get you setup quickly and even help you with the DNS replication process, if you so choose.