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Well I won't repeat what I said over on Porn Resource today about my weekend but I am so glad that we take some responsibility for our hosting and don't leave it all up to the hosting company.

Here in adult we are blessed with some of the best hosting companies on the planet. They respond quickly to problems ... they are always on call ... and they're not all that expensive either. I can email the guys at Phatservers at just about any hour of the day or night and get response in just a few minutes and when you're in this sort of business that's vital.

Contrast that level of hosting with many of the hosts here in Australia ... if you're site goes down outside of normal business hours you're stuffed until 8am on the next business day ... they charge like a wounded buffalo ... and with some you've got to wait till they call you back before you can get them to fix whatever the problem is.

So when you work with some of the best hosting companies in the business you tend to get a little bit lazy. You become almost too reliant on your hosting company and you leave everything up to them.

You know they do backups of your data so you don't worry about doing any of that for yourself. You know that they use the best equipment that money can buy so you begin to think that problems can never arise. You begin to forget that the fate of your website is dependant on a very thin piece of fragile material that could shatter into a million pieces sometime in the next five milliseconds.

Over in mainstream there are a lot of website owners who don't even understand that problems can occur and that they should be taking some responsibility for their websites. They don't understand that their sites could be hacked some time today ... they have no concept of backups and they trust their future to their web hosts.

And many of us here in adult do the same ... we allow our web hosting company to have control over our future because we've become too lazy to take some of that responsibility ourselves.

A couple of weeks ago a new client came to us and wanted us to make some changes to their website. The person who came to us was the spokesperson for a group of business people who had banded together to market their product via a website. The group had discussed some changes that they wanted for their website and they had sent this guy along to get us to make those changes.

Even though the website used a very obscure content management system that we had never seen before we managed to make the changes. But then the group changed its mind ... as groups so often do ... and wanted us to roll back those changes to the point where the original site was back online.

No problems, it could be done ... or so we thought ... and we did manage to get some of the pages back to the way they had looked before we made the changes. But not all of the changes could be made because the client didn't have a copy of what was there originally and even though there were cached versions of the pages to work from we couldn't get the content management system to do what we wanted it to d. So we contacted the host to see if they had a backup of the site and they did ... it was made the day after we made the changes.

On Saturday we encountered a major problem with one of our own online shops and in the course of fixing the problem we found we needed a backup of the database ... but not the most recent backup ... the one that our host would have provided. We needed a backup from a day or two earlier and because we download backups of all our databases on a daily basis we had what we wanted.

While other issues kept the shop offline over the weekend the database issue was fixed in a couple of minutes and when the site went live again the database kicked in and everything worked ... and looked ... as it should.

And the moral of that story is that your websites are vital to the success of your business so don't leave everything up to your web host. Even if you have the very best web host on the planet hosting your web sites take some responsibility for your own future.

Keep backups of all your sites ... keep daily backups of all your databases ... make sure that if the worst happens and your host's data centre disappears in a ball of fire you can have your business back online in a few hours.

Your business is your responsibility and not the responsibility of anyone else.