Automate Your Business

Archive for the ‘AYB Toolkit’ Category

I subscribe to Google Alerts for a few phrases, one of the being “caffeinated content” – and I’ve just read about a new version that works with EzineArticles. Well, that was news to me, so I went to Kansieo.com (the creator of Caffeinated Content), and there, in the member’s section, was version 3.38 – a later version than the one I’ve got.

There’s nothing on his blog about it, and I’ve not received a mail about it, so this is the first I’ve heard about it.

I’ll be installing and testing it over the next few days, then updating Caffeinated Content Scheduler as soon as I can to account for any differences.

In the meantime, if you are using the scheduler, I’d recommend NOT upgrading to 3.38, as I don’t know if the scheduler will work with it.

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.

The last one in our series of backup problems is not one that can be resolved by the backup script.

I had backups scheduled. They were running. They were FTPing to my own home PC as well as a local copy on the hosting company’s server.

Sweet.

Once a week or so, I’d log in and check that they were still running. Yes, there they were, all the accounts backed up, with the latest backup for each domain showing as being completed within the last 24 hours.

Then there was a problem – the kernel on my VPS had not been updated, a parked domain had been hacked and used in a Paypal scam, and the host insisted on rebuilding the VPS so that there were no “backdoors” left by the hacker.

“Not a problem,” said I. “Please go ahead.”

… wait…

“Er, Mr Peacock,” said support. “Our backups are corrupt.”

“That’s OK,” I said. “Here’s a copy I’ve got on my own PC.”

“Er, Mr Peacock,” said support. “Your backups are corrupt as well.”

“Oh *~$!,” I said.

Luckily, I had the source code for the websites in my working folders on my PC, but I lost the data from the databases.

So… the moral for today is to every-so-often, take a fresh backup (in the Cpanel Auto Domain Backup script, just hit “Run” next to the relevant domain). Then create a hosting accout ON A SEPARATE HOST, with the same account username, and restore that backup. You should still be able to access the account using a URL like this:

http://www.host.com/~accountusername

(but check with your host if this is exactly right). It should pretty much be a copy of the live site. You might find some issues where an application is trying to access the proper domain name, and it doesn’t like the temporary name above, but as least you’ll then know that the backup itself is OK.

Hope that helps.

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.