I found a solution to a problem that has occurred to me three times before. This first happened to me 3 years ago when I was at work. I get an e-mail from my host saying that they have disabled my Rugby website because it contains a virus.
Horrified by this I jump to the phone and contact my host claiming that this must be a mistake. They then proclaimed that my website had in fact been hacked via a security loophole in one of the earlier versions of Joomla (apparently that use to happen a lot in Joomla 1.5… happened to me 3 times!). I asked when I could expect my website to be back online. They said within the next 4 hours. GAH! That 4 hours cost me 6 months of SEO. Googlebot came during that 4 hour downtime and penalised me HEAVILY! All this for something that wasn’t my fault. This happened 2 more times to me.
So whats the point of having a backup of your website when your host has taken your website down? Let me remind you that your host can take a site down for any reason they want. They can even take it down because it’s too big, maintenance, or in my case because it was hacked!
The solution which is SO important if you are making a living off the internet is to have a backup host. For this website I have it hosted with Bluehost but I also have a backup server with dreamhost (which only cost me $10 for the entire year as it was a special one off thankdgiving deal).
There are a bunch of sites out there that can keep you informed the moment your website goes down (within the minute). I know a good paid service is http://www.pingdom.com/ there are a whole bunch of other free ones out there that are just as good, just do a simple Google search.
The moment I get a notification from pingdom that my website is offline I change my nameservers over to my backup host (dreamhost) and run the site off my backup which I keep updated. Now I can contact my original host and take care of the problem without having to worry about Google crawling my site while it’s down. This has saved me so much grief and anxiety over the years. Love it and thought I would share it with you all today.