thinks

In my life, I have only really coveted three jobs:

• Rock ‘n’ roll superstar - I saw Elvis in GI Blues or Jailhouse Rock on the channel 9 Saturday afternoon movie when I was a little kid in the 70’s and thought, “That’s the life for me.”
• Center fielder for the New York Mets - Same as above, except instead of Elvis on channel 9, it was Tommie Agee.
• User interface designer - Sure, it’s a bit of a switch from the other two, but years of working in recording studios in the 80’s taught me exactly how important it was that products met people’s needs. Time is money, after all.

These days I do marketing and e-commerce and spend most of my time worrying about how customers experience brands online. So, I’ve achieved the last of these, in a fashion that satisfies me.

Jesse James Garrett, a sort of rock star user interface designer, and the author of the damned-fine “The Elements of User Experience” provided terrific life advice a few weeks back that you should check out. It may sound like “fake it ’til you make it.” But my experience tells me that you only achieve your dreams when you go after them.

Happy New Year everyone. Make 2008 a great year. Here’s hoping you get everything you want.

Peace.

How’s your week been? Mine. Not so great. Last Thursday, my web hosting company appears to have closed their doors, taking this site down with them. Gone. Dead. Kaput.

How would you like to spend your weekend trying to get your site up and running again from scratch? Worse, how would you like to do it on big revenue days like a Monday? Yeah, me neither.

I’ve learned - re-learned - some valuable lessons during this period. I thought you might appreciate avoiding my pain by hearing what they are.

1. Keep backups. I know, I know. We’ve all been told this. Here’s the thing. How many days do you want to spend getting your life together after if it goes away? Backup one day less than that. If you’re OK with spending a month putting your life back together, back up every 29 days. I did my last backup on November 4. When my site died on November 25, I got screwed. EVERYTHING between those two weeks was gone. Is gone. If anyone has a copy of my blog posts, boy I’d sure like to have them. Seriously.
2. Make a copy of the backups. No, really. It doesn’t take much to backup your hard drive with a site like Carbonite (PC-only today, though Mac is coming) or any number of Mac services. I had the nightmare scenario. My laptop - where I do all my writing - died the same week as my web host. Think stuff like that only happens in Ben Stiller movies? Surprise! Fortunately, I had a copy on a share drive in addition to the one on my laptop. I’d have been way more hosed if I hadn’t. It’s likely I still wouldn’t have content on this site. And just imagine what happens to your Google PageRank then.
3. Develop a checklist of emergency tasks. For instance, should you stop your paid search campaigns first or should you put up a page telling your customers what’s happened? Most small companies don’t have the resources to do these in parallel, so it’s critical you - and your team - understand what the priorities are. When you find yourself in a hole, first you need to stop digging. It’s bad enough that you’re losing revenue. Don’t make it worse by not knowing how to stop.
4. Make sure you have all your critical contact information for your hosting company, development shop and other key providers available in more than one location. For instance, I didn’t have my web hosting company’s super secret tech support phone number I’d dug up a while back anywhere but on my local drive (see item #2 above). While I found their main number on Google, they weren’t answering that line anymore.
5. Manage your DNS separate from your hosting. If my DNS was hosted by the same company as my website, I’d seriously be dead right now. In truth, I wouldn’t remotely know how to deal with that situation. Which is another item for #3 on this list now, isn’t it?
6. Pay attention to trouble with your service providers. I don’t recommend jumping ship every time you have a little bugaboo with your service. Managing websites/hosting/development is complicated and occasionally things go wrong. But if you start to see a pattern of issues with a provider, demand immediate resolution or start shopping for a new provider.
7. Always have a Plan B. What saved my butt was that I was already in the process of moving my site from one host to another. You don’t want to have to figure out what your alternatives are when you have no alternative. No matter how happy you are with your hosting company, development shop, analytics provider, marketing agency, what-have-you, you need to know who else is out there and what they can do for you. Take an hour or two every month at lunchtime and review alternative providers. That way, if you do need to make a sudden move, at least you’re not starting from scratch.

I know this list is incomplete. Preparing for emergencies with your site can be a full-time job. But, these are the critical items most businesses need to have covered. Please add anything I missed to the comments. And I hope you have a better week than I did.

I’ve still got some cleaning up to do throughout the site, plus I’m still (as of Sunday, December 2) missing the last several weeks posts. Additionaly, I’ve got to get Feedburner running again, though you can subscribe to my RSS feed using the link at the bottom of the page. Look forward to these items coming back online over the next few days. Look forward to a lessons learned post here in the next few days. At least you can learn from my pain.

Hi all. Here’s an object lesson for everyone. Especially me. Even experienced web guys get burned once in a while. My former hosting company appears to have folded its tents. Forever. Their site is down and their 800# is disconnected. The result is my site has been dark for the last 18 hours or so. Given that running this site isn’t my day job, I haven’t been able to expedite the fix any quicker. But, no excuses. When you live your life online, you also need to prepare for when things go wrong. Shame on me.

Anyhow, I’ve been planning a move to a new hosting company for about a month now and had been working through the details. Unfortunately, AvidHosting (the former host) has forced my hand. I’ll be working over the next few days to restore missing content and to correct the lost categories on the blog. Thanks for your patience while I correct these problems.

P.S., anyone with good tools/utilities for converting older WordPress database categories to the new 2.3.1 database structure, please drop me an email at tim-at-timpeter-dot-com. I would appreciate the assist.

I can’t tell you how much I hate my current hosting provider. Actually, I could, but that’s not productive. Let’s focus on the future, shall we? I’m thinking of moving to DreamHost. Any thoughts?