Who do you want answering the phone in the middle of the night?

Just when I thought it was safe to go to sleep last night, 1a.m after loading up a truck full of blank t-shirts, I was going to put my thoughts down aboout my "Cold Fusion" experiments and how to solve the plastisol ink verus water based ink problem, when I when to my pages and found a "we are currently moving our website". Insert "WTF" here as my heart starts to beat rapidly thinking that my domain name was sniped. Low and Behold my server company, IX Webhosting, is up and moving their damn servers and will be down for up to 2-days. Two friggin' days is an eternity for loss of sales and indexing as my entire world can be dumped from indexed servers. My images are all stored on these servers that are being moved so the sites that I use for my web business were either down completely or looked like a jumbled mess of unloaded images.

Luckily may main shopping cart was on a Yahoo server and my son has a site on another server with FTP so instead of sleeping and solving the world's problems I had to upload new generic image links and substitute headers into my web pages. It's a good thing I didn't have a few drinks or my internet world would've been crashed around my head in the morning. The point here is that you never know what is going to happen with running an internet business. Mostly dumb things happen that screw up everything and it is the dumb things that take up most of the time. I can't say I was working all night, because there is nothing on my main website at yque.com that can prove it. As far as my wife knows I was probably up all night looking at porn. Sure if you had an IT department these things could be solved by others, but you can't count on it so it is better to do it myself.

These two sites are still down, ekay.com and t-shirts.org, so none of the fancy things I wanted to work on and update will be functioning this weekend, but my basic operations are working at yque.com. Still how many backups do you need? You can't count on indexing to stabalize your business, because being down a few days can change everything and even switching to a new server company for my websites would mess up my ip numbers. There isn't an easy answer as the web is more akin to voodoo than practical mechanics. The only good news is that this will force me to go back to basics and rebuild the site and hope that the site still has some traffic.