I learned a hard lesson this weekend and it was something I had been meaning to take care of but kept putting it off. Back up your online websites and online data!
At the NAMS6 conference in August David even had a security expert come in and talk to us about different security problems online. David talked about he got hacked and had serious problems that cost him quite a bit of money to be fixed back at the start of the year. Not to mention the money he lost while his site was down.
My problem was a little different and I am still at a loss as to exactly how this happened even after spending a couple of hours online with my hosting account.
It all started last week when I tried to log into one of my affiliate websites and I got an error message. I then put my URL into Google and guess what. There was an error message again.
So I started checking my other affiliate websites and I had 4 websites that had disappeared. I am still trying to understand how this happened but so far no one has been able to explain it to me. At least where I can understand it.
The bottom line is I did not back up my systems and now all the work is gone. These were sites that had numerous pages and a lot of work put into them. Not just some quick one page affiliate sites that people throw up.
So I am sitting here now wandering how to go about building them back up. It will be a lot of work to get them back to the way they were.
The lesson learned here is to back up your websites.
The company I will use to backup my work is Mozy Online Backup. I have heard several other marketers talk about them for a year or two now and they were talked about at NAMS 6 by Regina Smola who was giving classes on securing your work online..
I wish I had followed up and took action after hearing her talk and the several problems David faced last year. Now I have to find the time to rebuild the websites and of course I will have no money coming in from them for awhile so it will be just like starting over with those sites.
You live and learn. Don’t make the same mistake I did and do nothing. Go click on the Mozy Banner to the right and keep your online data secure. You can backup your data very cheaply by the way in case you were wandering.
If any of you have had your website hacked or lost all the material on your website I would love to hear about it so we can all learn from it.
Please leave your comments below.
backup online data – Google News