If you were faced with a situation where your domain registrar disappeared, or your host went down - could your business survive?Do you have a back-up plan in place to protect yourself, and your business? When you are looking at building and/or implementing disaster recovery systems (no they are NOT only for the "big" guys) you need to keep many things in mind, some from the most basic such as backing up your data to website redundancy.
It can be done, even by the most novice of individuals.
First lets look at what you could be doing wrong: Using minor players in the domain registration market.
Do you stick with smaller players because of price point?What happens if that domain registrar goes broke?Or is shut down?While there is no guarantee that the medium to large size companies will be around forever the size of the operation, especially when it relates to IT (and I use the term loosely to categorize companies that deal with IT or IT related areas) and your business you should be cautious.
Hosting Hosting can be cheep/cheap or inexpensive- you pick.
In my mind cheap DOES NOT equal inexpensive.
ANYONE can be a host.
If you have a reseller accounts, you an easily turn around and become a host by offering cheap hosting.
Some of the providers out there do exactly this - while other providers run complex businesses where they may either host their own equipment or use another companies managed or unmanaged services.
Regardless of the case you always want to pick a host that offers good value at a good price point.
You should do some research, this is as simple as asking another webmaster about the host they use.
If you are running a business that is generating serious cash every month then don't you owe it to at least consider a dedicated or semi-dedicated server?With most dedicated servers, you have quite a bit of control over the systems resources.
You can pick and choose the type of server, the type of CPU, the amount of memory and hard drive space.
You can upgrade at anytime, so that your site scales as your visitor count increases.
If you can not afford a dedicated server now - no worries, do you back-up your site at least?If you back-up weekly then you only lose one weeks worth of information.
Back-up less frequently and you loose more.
Most companies will back-up daily, and weekly and keep the back-ups off-site for safe keeping.
Website Redundancy Few if any webmasters spend anytime on making their website redundant.
Basically this means that if your site goes down at host A you are still up and running at host B and the failover mechanism will automatically route visitors to the other site making the entire transition virtually seamless.
Failover and redundancy are not complex issues, and can be handled with a little research and tools.
This is also known as DNS Failover.
Using DNS Failover you point your domains to the DNS provided by the company providing the failover service.
Your site would be hosted on multiple servers.
The service checks the primary site every few minutes to ensure it is still up.
If it does not respond, it will failover to the next host and so on.
It is still up to you to ensure that the data you have at multiple hosts is the most current.
If you don't want to spend a lot of time with DNS FAILOVER or even think about website redundancy, then at minimum you should be backing up your site in case the host goes down.