This Needs to Be Repeated
Posted On: 2010-01-25
Right ... this is Monday so it should be a day when I'm really fired up and ready for some work ... but for some reason I'm still stuck in weekend mode and here in Australia tomorrow is a public holiday so I think today is just about a write-off already... only kidding because I am raring to go and sort out a lot of issues for new clients we're about to take on.
It's not that we didn't work over the weekend ... we did but the work we did probably looked more like being tourists than really working and we plan to do more of that tomorrow too. We've actually been out and about taking photos for a couple of mainstream sites we're working on and while we may see that as work others may not.
Also over the weekend we spent some time with a friend trying to rescue his business website. He employed a web design business to design and host his site and left everything in their hands and that worked for him ... and went on working for him for several years.
Sometimes, in his situation, you can be lucky and never have anything go wrong but there are always risks when you let others control important parts of your business. Now one of those risks has escalated into a crisis and his site is in real danger of disappearing.
It seems that the partners in the business that he had trusted to build his site, host it and manage his domain name as well have had a falling out and gone their separate ways. The partner who seems to be controlling the hosting and domain name for his business does not want to relinquish that control to our friend and at the moment anything could happen.
Oddly enough the day before our friend contacted us for help another small business in town called. They had another designer in town build their site, handle their hosting and manage their domain name and they had received an email from him advising them that he was closing his business next week and they should find someone else to look after their website.
This business was advised that the designer would hand over all the files upon request but the only problem is that they don't have a phone number for him ... in fact they have never had a contact phone number ... they don't know where his office is and he's not responding to emails at the moment.
While that's going to make for a couple of very interesting hours for me today as I try to track him down it's going to cause a major headache for the business if I can't find him and he doesn't answer his emails.
Of course both these situations arose because people who are undoubtedly very good at what they do have no idea about how to manage websites, domains and hosting. Instead they allowed others to look after them and now they're facing the very real prospect of losing their websites and losing their domain names as well.
Both our friend and the small business had their websites built because it seemed to be the right thing to do but they never expected it to become important. Now, several years down the track, those websites have become a very important part of their business. Back at the start who actually had control of those sites didn't seem like much of an issue but now it's very important to the survival of both our friend's business and the other business too.
Of course control of your domains, your sites and your hosting isn't likely to be a problem for an experienced web professional like you is it?
Well I certainly hope it won't be a problem and I really do hope that you have total control of your domain names and you've got backups of all your sites just in case a problem arises with your hosting.
But even if you do have control of those things there is an important lesson here for all of us. That lesson is that we need to work to ensure that there is no single point of failure in any of the processes that our businesses rely on and we also need to ensure that there is no single point of failure in the structure of our businesses.
Some parts of our business or some new process that we're working on may seem fairly insignificant right now but who is to say that they will remain insignificant in the years ahead. Breezing through something that we're doing now and not building in at least some level of redundancy simply because we don't see that what we're doing will ever be that important in the future has the real potential to come back and bite us in the ass.
So take some time now to look at your business and find those parts of it where there is just a single point of failure and add some redundancy before things go wrong. And keep it in mind as you grow your business with new processes and new structure and make sure that one slight problem won't bring your entire business down.
Yes, I know that it can be a pain but taking some time now to make sure you have options is far better than watching your business come crashing down because you really did have a single point of failure that could destroy you.