Some of you may have noticed that all of my sites were down including this one was down for some time early in the morning yesterday. I was having problems with e-mail so I decided to just restart the server. Well it did not come back up. I couldn’t figure out why it would not come back up. I have my servers in a local data center about 35 minutes from my house. I talked to the guys down there and they said the server was on and running. So there had to be a problem and I was going to head down there and check it out. Right before I left they hooked up a console to the server and noticed it was stopped at the BIOS and they just had to hit F1 for the sever to initialize. This is the first time my sites have been down in a while and it opened my eyes to a lot.
Downtime means you are loosing money
The title pretty much explains it, if your site is down you are loosing money. That’s the only downfall of working online, if you have server problems you lose money. This really became apparent to me because this is the first time my site has gone down since it became my full time job. Since my websites are my only source of income any down time costs me money. Also if people see that it is down they might not come back, and if sponsors see that it’s down they will think that we are unprofessional.
Reliable Web Hosting
Reliable web hosting is something that you are going to want to have. Say you hit the front page of Digg and your site goes down, imagine the money that you could have made. I have had a few different front page Digg’s for a few of my sites and I would rather have had the boost in revenue then none at all. As I said my servers are hosted in a data center so I don’t deal with a hosting company. If anyone knows a good hosting company please post it below in the comments.
Being Knowledgeable About your Server
My servers run on Linux, but I really do not know that much about it. Every time there is a problem I can’t go off asking someone how to fix it. If you are running your own servers be sure to know what you doing and know the basic commands to stop and start services. If you are being hosted by someone else make sure you understand the control panel and know how to fix things if they go wrong. If you are lazy you can hire a server admin, but of course that costs money.
Access to the Server 24/7
Whether its web hosting or server hosting you need to have access to someone that can troubleshoot the problem 24/7. If your site goes down at 2AM you want it back up ASAP, you don’t want to have to wait till 9AM when the help desk opens back up. Also I would suggest finding a host that has a technical support line. I don’t like the idea of me e-mailing or submitting a help ticket (which is basically like e-mail) and waiting for them to get back to me. If there is a problem I want to talk to someone as soon as I see the problem. Also if you are hosting your servers somewhere you want to make it local so if there is a serious problem you can go to the data center and fix it yourself.
If you are running a successful website you don’t want it to go down so make sure you research your hosting options.