I once knew a small company that was effectively shut down because their internet service provider (ISP) had gone out of business. In order to recover the 'intellectual assets' of their business, they had to go to the liquidation auction of their ISP and bid on (and win!) the physical machines that had been running their websites. Would you fare any better?
As a business owner, you want to make sure you have a complete reconstitution plan. Backups are a good start, but aren't enough by themselves. Make sure your reconstitution plan includes:
- a tested backup and restore of the database, source code, deploy procedures, uploaded images/documents, and all of the configuration files specific to your servers. Make sure the backup contains all the files needed by your web app, in a format you can access and use for a restoration.
- a map of all of the servers in use, including their names, IP addresses, and services they are providing. This includes things like your name server and mail server, which are probably handled by your service provider (and ignored by most plans that think just having a backup is enough).
- The login credentials of your domain name registrar, in case you have to change your domain name servers.
- The login credentials to your domain name servers, in case you have to change the ip address of a name (so your "www.your-domain.com" can move to another server when necessary).
Spend a little time letting your imagination run through disaster recovery scenarios... What would happen if there were a fire in your data center? Would your backups be destroyed too? What would happen if your machines were hacked, data was corrupted, and you didn't discover it for a week? Would your only backups contain that corrupted data?
I hope you never need a reconstitution plan, but if you do, you'll be grateful for the time you spent preparing. As we all know, hope isn't a good business strategy. So start your plan now!
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