Automate Your Business

Archive for April, 2009

Short and sweet this one.

Sometimes, it’s actually possible for website owners to forget to set up any sort of backup.

Oops…

The “auto” in Cpanel Auto Domain Backup takes care of that bit for you

Where were we?

Ah yes. Yesterday I talked about how one company put their backups on the same drive as the main files, with the obvious issue when that drive went down.

Well, another company did the right thing, and put the backups on not just a different drive, but a different server altogether. It may or not may not have been in the same physical location – I’m not sure.

And it doesn’t actually matter whether it was in the same location, as the company went bankrupt with almost immediate effect, and I couldn’t access either server.

The morale of this story is: keep at least one regular backup within a different company than your hosting. Or even copy it to your own home. This can be done with the Cpanel Auto Domain Backup by simply setting up two sets of FTP details for where you want the backups to be done, and then set up to schedules for each domain, with one schedule sending the backup to the first FTP site, and the other schedule sending the backups to the second site.

Following on from the first in the backup horror stories, here’s another one, short and sweet.

This host, in their wisdom, did have regular, reliable backups running.

The backups were on the same drive as the live account.

Can you see what’s coming yet?

Yes, you got it, the drive failed. No live sites. No backups.

I got a new host.

Clickbank – along with a new look-and-feel – have released a hoplink encoder. So now, they’ve resolved the issue where people can read in plain text what your affiliate ID, insert there own ID, and visit that new link.

So not only do they rob you of your commission, but they effectively get a discount by having the commission paid back to themselves.

Now, the link will be something like http://2aa72ltysjn9hr9y0mzyx5-5rb.hop.clickbank.net/

Much harder to work out who the affiliate is and insert your own link, wouldn’t you say?

I say! Well done Clickbank! About time too!

Oh…

Wait…

What’s that….?

Ah.

It’s a decoder. So now the thieves just enter the encrypted URL, read off the affiliate ID, insert their own ID, and…. blah blah blah, same old, same old, you know the story.

[Exasperated sigh]

Come ON Clickbank. It’s really not that difficult!

What’s that

As noted previously, I’ve just released my cpanel backup script.

My primary reason for this was due to the unreliability of the backup offered by a succession of hosts.

For example, one hosting company (SLHost.com) stated that they offered backups.

I had an issue – I was housekeeping some obsolete accounts that I hosted with them, and accidentally deleted a domain I wanted to keep), so I submitted a support ticket asking them to restore the last backup.

Here’s the response I got:

Envelope-to: andrew@xxxxxxxxxx.com
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.2.0 (2007-05-01) on
server.xxxxxxxxxx.info
X-Spam-Level:
X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.6 required=5.0 tests=AWL,RDNS_NONE autolearn=no
version=3.2.0
To: xxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.com
Subject: [SUPPORT #XXX-XXXXX]: Backup required?
X-Mailer: Kayako eSupport v3.00.13
Cc:
From: “SLHost.com Support”
Reply-To: support@slhost.com
Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 03:21:31 -0500
X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report
X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname – zeus.slnoc.com
X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain – xxxxxxxxxx.com
X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID – [99 99] / [47 12]
X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain – slhost.com
X-Source:
X-Source-Args:
X-Source-Dir:

Andrew,

Unfortunately we do not have a backup of the server, since we are on the transition to a new backup system. There is no way we can restore the deleted domain.

-Thomas

Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: XXX-XXXXX
Department: Technical Support
Priority: High
Status: On Hold

Surely, the whole process of changing to a new backup system should include a small window when backups are available via both the original system AND the new one? Not a window where neither system has a backup.

And the whole point of customer service is that when you have planned outages of any part of the hosting infrastructure, you proactively tell your customers BEFORE the issue happens.

So, the beauty of the Cpanel Auto Domain Backup script is that I can set up something like the following:

1. Some FTP space on my PC.
2. Some FTP space on a remote server (not my domain host).
3. A schedule to copy each domain to my PC.
4. A schedule to copy each domain to the remote host.

That way, I actually have potentially 4 backups in place:

1. My PC
2. The remote server space.
3. A local copy of each domain on the actual host, which is created as part of the cpanel backup.
4. Any special backups that the host has put in place.

That’s pretty safe.

But there are other horror stories that I’ve been through, and I’ll share them over the next few days.