Web Marketing - Check your site and email!
Date: 3 April 2008

We have said it before but had a salient reminder about this last month.

Our hosting company suffered a hacking attack so made some security changes on one of their servers, hosting one of our sites. They did not advise clients of this change.

Fortunately we were working on site content at the time so immediately noticed the site had stopped working. On querying the hosting company they admitted that their changes would affect many sites, and that this required immediate changes to the code of the site (which we made).

Several days later they had another hardware issue with the same server.

We were fortunate because we are working with our sites constantly so notice changes. However many people do not look at their sites often, if at all. In some cases it could be weeks or months before broken sites were noticed.

We can only advise that you regularly look at your site and make sure all pages are working.

If you have more than one site check them all – one may be fine and another broken if they are on different servers.

Do not assume that if your home page is working everything else will be too – especially with database driven sites. Check all content is actually there and it doesn’t just "look OK" from a quick look.

Don’t be afraid to ask your hosting company or developer to check if there is a problem – what has caused the problem may be technical and require their input to help. Your site is an integral part of your business.

Also check your email links, contact forms, and especially booking forms are working – recent Xtra email problems have affected some sites.

Consider investing in a site uptime checker that periodically monitors your site to see if it is working. Just remember that this will just find if the site is loading and will not find if the content is correct or missing.

A free checker is available at Internetseer.com. You may be surprised what it tells you. More advanced paid options are also available from them.

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