Back in May, customers of Australian web hosting company Crazy Domains received an unsettling email from their provider. “Due to an unforeseen incident in a storage upgrade,” the letter reads, “the data from your hosting account has unfortunately been irretrievably lost.” It’s been reported that 18 out of some 10,000 clients utilizing the particular server were affected, and while this seems a mere scratch statistically, we’re talking about 18 individual websites and businesses obliterated overnight!
This should be alarming to anyone who hosts a website through a service provider, especially considering Crazy Domains could only offer affected customers $100 in credit to make up for the fiasco. When calculating the financial strain of rebuilding lost email contacts, support costs and restaging the overall infrastructure of a website (big or small), $100 barely scratches the surface.
However, most site owners don’t calculate for loss and leverage damage control until after something like this happens. It’s simply human nature. But it’s successful webmasters who prepare for the worst and scale accordingly, usually starting by selecting a hosting provider that takes security as seriously as the client. Take HostGator for instance. Its data center – located at the CyrysOne Houston West facility offers multiple levels of infrastructure redundancy, including: UPS battery backup units, power distribution units, and diesel fuel tanks equipped with thousands of gallons. In other words, HostGator seems prepared for the worst, and that’s just one of the reasons the web hosting provider ranks so highly on our site.
If your current host does not share the same passion for high performance, fully redundant network technology, perhaps you might want to consider jumping ship before something similar to the Crazy Domains issue occurs. Remember: hosting should just be one facet of what a hosting company actually does to keep clients plugged in and their data safe from sinking.
