Automate Your Business

Archive for August, 2009

OK, I’ve closed the competition, and over the next day or two I’ll pick the best name from the entries to be the winner (and as promised, even if I end up using a name I choose, the prize will still go to the best entry.

I’ll post again soon. Good luck to all who entered!

I’m on the Rhodes brothers’ mailing lists, because they have some great products available. But they’ve just sent this update on their business:

Our main web server crashed…

Yesterday at 10:53AM EST our web sites suffered
a major meltdown. We lost just about everything
on our server, including our blogs, memberships,
opt in pages, download pages, and more.

** Ouch! **

We have some backups but not enough for a full
restore. And, we just found out that some of our
local backups are corrupt too.

Don’t be one of the people that this happens to. Make sure you are backing your websites (or to put it more strongly, make sure you are backing up your business). And not just the webpages – also the databases, the email accounts, the hosting configuration, and everything else that you do within Cpanel.

And every so often, make a backup, and then restore it immediately, just to make sure the backups are not corrupt. I had this problem too, so I personally know how you go from heartache (”someone’s hacked my sites”) to relief (”I’ve got the backup from yesterday”) to confusion (”Dear support: why won’t my backup restore?”) back to double heartache (”Dear customer: your backups were corrupt”).

Start backing up. Now.

Do not upgrade to v2.134 (which is only available as a manual download, I think). It’s got a problem where it will randomly lose details including your page layout (graphics, sizes, etc). And there’s no easy way to restore just one site from a backup.

Enough’s enough.

Ever since GetResponse upgraded to their latest version, the quality of their application has been utterly atrocious:

• Scheduled mails not gone out.
• Unable to move subscribers to a different message in the same autoresponder.
• Copying one campaign to a new one misses out more than half the configuration data from the original one, including the registered postal address of the mailing list owner, which is the only legal requirement (in the US).
• Support is taking 3-4 days to come back with a “we’ve passed this to our technicians” message, and then just under another week to say they’ve fixed the issue… and then the issue still remains.

Enough.

So if you’re on one of my mailing lists, over the next few weeks you’ll receive a confirmation message from  my new mailing provider, MailChimp. An odd name, but no odder than SurveyMonkey, which is their other, more well-known company.

I’ll mail each of you on my GetResponse list to say that the confirmation mail from MailChimp should be waiting in your inbox.

Hopefully, you’ll get the mail from GetResponse….

Just a quick update. A few users of the Cpanel Auto Domain Backup script have asked if I can recommend somewhere for FTP storage. Well, I’ve just heard of SoftLayer.com, and they offer 50Gb of storage (with FTP and other methods of access) for only $10 a month.

Their terms state: “Plans include 1GB bandwidth. Once the monthly bandwidth allotment has been met, there will be a $0.10/GB charge for bandwidth used during the remainder of the current billing cycle. All plans include free inbound bandwidth.” Which sounds pretty good to me for this situations.

They backup locally (ie, in their data centre) via RAID. Which is techno-babble for “several disks which mirror each other”, which is great because if one disk fails, they have others with a copy of your data. They don’t backup to a remote site, however. But, if you’re running the backup script, you’ll have backups at your host already, and then an extra backup at SoftLayer. So unless both sites go up in flames at the same time, your data should be safe.