Don’t get caught off-guard. As a former Boy Scout, I live by the enduring motto, “Be prepared.”
What if your website went down for 40 minutes? Or 40 hours? What’s your Plan B?
It happened to Amazon.com on Monday, costing sales of an estimated $4.8 million during its 40-minute outage. If it can happen to Amazon, it can happen to your site.
No content strategy should be without alternate channels to continue storytelling and interaction, or at the least, emergency updates.
Our list of questions to consider in preparing for Internet outages:
Website / blog
- Do you have an alternate site to post updates? (Many companies keep a Tumblr or other simple blog on a different server, including Twitter.) (During a site outage, the New York Times published short news updates without links on Twitter and full stories on its Facebook page.)
- Do you multiple ways to contact your hosting service, including email, text, phone and Twitter?
- Are you backing up your site regularly? (Some of you need weekly or daily offsite backups, and some need hourly backups.)
- How quickly can you restore your site from backup? What about during off-hours?
- Can you run your site from a backup server, keeping downtime to a minimum?
- How does your hosting service handle traffic spikes? Hacker attacks?
- As employees leave, is their access shut down immediately? (This applies to social media and email, too.)
Social media
- If one channel goes offline, is it easy for your users to find you on other channels?
- Can followers reach specific people at your company (customer service, sales, technical support) directly by email or phone? Or through a chat function on your site?
- How will you get out scheduled campaigns if a particular channel is unavailable? Will your reschedule or cancel?
- For partial outages (affecting some but not all users), can you quickly respond to questions and complaints when service resumes?
Take steps today to ensure minimal downtime and maximum effectiveness if you suddenly lose one of your communication tools.
Photo: Jim Benton (CC)
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