Disaster Recovery

How important to your business is your web site? Hopefully, if you're reading this, it has become (or you plan for it to become) a major source of revenue and profit. Have you thought about what might happen to that revenue and profit if your web site were to become unavailable for an hour, a day, a week or more?

Disaster recovery is the discipline of planning for and implementing policies and procedures that will insure that long-term outages are handled in a way that minimizes the financial impact on the business. Most computer users are familiar with backing up important computer files, but that is only the first step in a true disaster recovery plan. What about the situation where your hosting provider will be down for an extended period (maybe they're located in California, and the big one hits)? All your backups won't do you any good if you don't have a server to which you can restore them.

Depending on the financial impact of an outage, you might have a mirror site ready to go, such that a simple update of your domain name pointers will restore customer access to your site. Other outages might be experienced by hardware failure on the hosting server. While they may backup your HTML and image files, most hosting services won't provide a usable backup of your database content. If your web applications depend upon things like product catalogs and user logins, you must have your own disaster recovery plan and procedure in place to restore your web site to its former usable (and profitable) state.