How to Survive a Blog Crash

Jong’s blog went offline for several days only to go back online with most of his archives gone, vanished to oblivion. It could have been prevented. Here are several things you might keep in mind to prevent such tragedy to happen with your blog:

• Backup. This is the single most important step. There are half a dozen ways to do this. Your cPanel has one, use it and download a full copy. If you know your way around phpMyAdmin, export all the databases into a zip file and keep a copy in your local PC. This is a good method if you have other scripts installed, like a photogallery or WordPress hacks and plugins that use the database. Install a WordPress DB backup plugin (if you are running WP). This way you can download a backup everyday with little or no effort at all.
• Maintain a list of emails from all your commenters. This way, they can be emailed about what happened to your blog if ever that dreaded day arrives. Your regular readers may want to know about it asap.
• Talk to your host about their redundancy strategy. If they have several servers, you can request your backup be restored into another live server.
• Find a backup host. This is important if your current provider is just a reseller or has only one server. If you have a local back-up with you, they should be able to restore your blog in no time. Our record time for restoring blogs is 15 mins.
• Get a personal domain as you can take this from one provider to another. A subdomain accout may get you in trouble because the URL tied up with your provider.
• Edit your blog theme locally and upload it to your host. That way you always have the latest revisions, mods and hacks in your PC and not in the server.