Safety Tips for Website Development
There are several steps you should build into your schedule when developing a website. In the old days, you would design a website on your local PC and save html files on your local hard drive before uploading to a remote host site. And maybe backing up to recordable cd or a second hard drive connected to your home PC.
Today, it’s customary to use an internet dashboard for remote design & editing (like you might find with a WordPress Blog or the popular Noah’s Classifieds). The files are still stored in various directories on your host site, but chances are that much of your original content is now housed in a database owned & managed by your chosen hosting company.
This is where you need to make an investment of time in learning to back-up your databases. I have several sites hosted on various servers (Windows & Linux) each with various software versions and user interfaces. To be blunt, none of them are particularly intuitive or user-friendly. Which means that you spend considerable time trying to figure out how to navigate their unique interface and perform basic functions.
Periodically backing up your site files and database is critically important. If you are embarking upon a new project, I want to emphasize to you how important it is that you positively back-up your site content in at least two separate locations.
I have recenty adopted the technique of running a mirror site for several of my primary websites. These mirror sites are exact duplicates of my primary websites and I use them for experimentation and design/layout changes. This allows me to perform a direct A-B comparison between the newly altered mirror site and the primary website. A secondary advantage to comparing layouts in this way is the peace of mind I have knowing that dramatic coding rewrites are being performed on the mirror site, and not the primary site.
In other words, you work out the kinks and problems on a practice site. If there’s a major malfunction and the website crashes, then it’s the mirror site that goes down while the primary website remains online, operational, and safe.
I also recommend when installing and working with new software that you specifically talk to tech support and inquire as to the software’s vulnerabilities. I purchased some rather expensive software last year that had several inherent weaknesses that made the software vulnerable to hacking. Of course I did not know this when I bought it. However, there was a fix for this, but the software company never bothered to mention it. Only after being hacked, and having to reconstruct my site, did they tell me there were several options for reducing their software’s vulnerability via changing a few settings. Amazing, huh? Yes, I know.
When a site goes down, it hurts business. Visitors are not served, and search engine ranking can be negatively impacted depending on how long the site is offline. With a fully backed up database and site files, chances are you will be back up & running good as new in perhaps an hour or less. Priceless!
