A Cautionary Tale

A friend called me early this morning with a horror story - A well-intended member of their management team tested a new piece of website software yesterday. They were giddy with excitement to get the jump on their competitors’ right before the start of the holiday shopping season and…they…just…wanted….to….see…ooOOOoooOOOOh NOOOooOOOO! The shock and awe of breaking a live website is hard to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it. But 16 sleepless, panicked hours later, my friend’s site is still down. It’s broken. The plane has hit the mountain. To make matters worse, the company insisted on having “total control” of their website, and opted to host it in-house.  Now, they’ve got total control of a nightmare. A well-meaning, seemingly harmless action like activating a new plug-in or upgrading to the latest version of your CMS can cause unexpected errors, or much, much worse.  Come to find out, the road to hell really is paved with good intentions! At SOLID, our robust and world-class off-site hosting system automatically creates a staging site (an independent clone of the live production website) where we test plugins, themes, and custom code. The Solid Web Service website hosting system also has an automatic, daily backup feature to help ensure our clients’ website data is kept safe. Our backup points contain the website database as well as all theme, plugin, and core files.  Should we ever experience a problem, our customers’ sites can be reverted to a daily restore point from earlier in the day, yesterday, or last month. Hopefully my colleague's situation never happens to you. To ensure it doesn’t, take some time to ask questions about your hosting configuration, backups and your test policies. Website hosting, test environments, and backups are just a tiny part of the conversation we’re looking forward to having with you. If you’re thinking it’s time for a SOLID website, we’d love to schedule an in-depth consultation so you can understand why our customers say, “Everybody Needs A SOLID Website!”