The ultimate worst-case scenario in web marketing is if a website crashes without a current backup. Is it the end of the website? Often times, yes. Truthfully, this nightmare situation hits a little too close to home these days.

Our Recent Experience with a Website Crashing

Recently the web-hosting provider for one of our long-time Clients was the victim of a ransomeware encryptovirus. What does this mean? It means that a virus attacked the server where our Client’s website lives and encrypted the data on the server. Typically these hackers request an amount of money to release the data. In our case, the hosting provider let us know they were reconfiguring all their servers and we would need to spin up the site from our most recent backup.

Oh, by the way, this Client has TWO websites, one built in WordPress and another built with .asp, and both were compromised.

The .asp Website Crashes

Originally we thought this wouldn’t be an issue, because the hosting provider sent this Client a weekly email alert that the site had been backed up. Unfortunately, we came to learn that the backup was being stored on the same server as the website files, so they may have been compromised by the virus.

Pro Tip: If you hosting provider is making and storing a website backup for you, make sure to ask where the backup is hosted. Best practices are to store the backup off site, in multiple locations. For example, Top Shelf stores backups on our local server, on a local external hard drive, and in the cloud.

The timing of all of this couldn’t have been worse. The website developer we’d been working with (this isn’t a WordPress site, it’s built in .asp, so it requires a level of expertise we prefer to outsource) had recently stopped servicing our web platform.

We had to go back into our archive of contacts and track down the original site developer to access the recovered files and determine if they were viable. Thankfully, by some kind of miracle, the backup files weren’t compromised! Our developer was able to reconfigure the data and get the site back up and running.

The only thing that wasn’t backed up was the Client’s blog. We lost 3 years of posts – something like 75 blogs – which drive the majority of organic website traffic to the site.

Pro Tip: Make sure you clarify specifically what files are included in the website backup. This is especially critical if you have a blog, or website that updates frequently.

After consulting with the Client’s Search Engine Optimization partner, we decided to repopulate the posts in descending order starting with the posts that had the highest traffic. Top Shelf keeps every blog (drafts and final versions) we write, so our team pulled a couple of all-nighters and got the blogs reposted over the course of three days.

The WordPress Website Crashes

This Client has a second website, built with WordPress and regularly backed up by Top Shelf. Once the hosting provider had the virtual server set up, we were able to spin up the WordPress site within 24-hours.

Trust No One. Do It Yourself. Expect Sabotage.

This experience was absolutely a learning lesson for the Top Shelf team in addition to our Client. Internally, we no longer allow Clients the option to handle their website backups on their own. We’ve made it a standard procedure to obtain a backup of all Client websites on a quarterly basis.

This is now a nonnegotiable service included in all of our WordPress website maintenance contracts.

We now request a quarterly full-site backup (clarifying that we want the site files and the blog files backed up) for the few websites we work on that are not built on WordPress.

In Conclusion

While this felt like a catastrophic situation, and for a few harrowing days we thought we’d lost ALL the site files and blogs, it could have been much worse. Rebuilding an entire website from it’s source code is considerably more work than configuring the files from a backup.

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