Let’s paint a picture here… your website goes down on a weekend. You don’t have an IT person, you don’t know who to call and your customers are calling you telling you they can’t order. This is why your website needs to be backed up immediately.

Sound like a nightmare? This is exactly what happened to our client about a month ago now. What we did was work over a weekend to prevent it from happening again.

Their website went down on a Friday night around 8:45. I wasn’t checking our work phones, but Kate texted me to make sure I received a text she got from a client. This client has a food-based business and the weekends are essential times for people to put in orders for their parties/ events and all of the above.

I quickly called him and asked him what the issue was. I knew it needed to be something serious in order to call me on a Friday night. He said that their website wasn’t showing their products at all. It was showing the pages but the products were hidden… which made it extremely hard to take any orders!

We took a look and he was right. None of his products were coming up. Then, we called the hosting company who had a 24/7 hotline. They didn’t answer. I got in touch with our IT guy to ask his opinion and when he tried to log into the back end of the website it wasn’t there. Gone. Vanished. It, frankly, looked like someone had hacked into the account and deleted a way for us (or anyone) to get into the account.

After around 12 hours of not being able to get in touch with someone from the hosting site, I decided to tweet them, message them on Facebook, message them on Instagram, comment on their Facebook, comment on their Instagram and finally… we got a tweet back for an emergency email address.

We emailed them ASAP and FINALLY resolved the issue. The moral of this episode is to get in touch with someone who knows what they’re doing on the IT side AND have a hosting company that actually has a 24/7 hotline. This could have been resolved in about an hour if it was working.

Hold on now… this isn’t the end of the road… and another reason your website needs to be backed up immediately. The same company had ANOTHER (yes another) issue on Sunday night. He texted me late on Sunday night saying that the website was completely down now. No access, no page, nothing. Dang.

We, once again, reached out to the emergency email and go it resolved this time in about 45 minutes. The issue was with the hosting company’s servers. They had failed for some reason.

Key takeaways here:

Have an IT person doing regular backups of their site.

If we didn’t have backups of their site it could have been lost. If you don’t understand what this means it’s DETRIMENTAL to your business. Think about all the SEO ranks, content, client info, etc. that could have been lost. It’s almost like your phone dying and losing all of your data… you’d be lost!

Make sure your hosting service answers their phone.

This sounds silly, but in the first example, if they would have answered their phone, we would have been able to resolve the issue in about an hour.

Have an IT person at your disposal.

If you don’t have someone to call when your email goes down, your website messes up or something is just wrong with a piece of your technology, you need to get someone on speed dial.

Lucky you, we do this!

Yep, that’s right. Along with having websites in our repertoire, we also handle backups, site updates, plugin updates on WordPress and any minor updates needed. Think of us as your dedicated website IT professionals. The best part? You can call us on the weekend and we’ll answer and help you get up in no time! Want to know what else is the best about this? The price is super affordable at only $200 per month! Hear me out here… this is what you’re getting:

• Website backups
• Site updates (up to 5 hours per month!)
• Plugin updates
• 24/7 calls as needed
• Email support

Yeah, it’s all covered. For only $200 per month, you can bet your site will be looking better than ever. And, nope, there are no contracts and you can cancel anytime. If you’re not happy, we’re not happy. So let’s cheers to having websites up and healthy! If these stories don’t convince you that your website needs to be backed up immediately, I don’t know what will! Even if it isn’t with us, look into it so your info isn’t unrecoverable.

Click here to schedule your FREE 30-minute call to go over how this can help your business!

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