Webhost down

Once in a while it happens that technical problems occur in the data center where your sites are hosted. If you're a customer since years already, your webhost will try to comfort you as fast as possible. How fast that can be depends upon what is broken or malfunctioning. In the last few days I did receive error messages more often. The webhost always answered, they had already fixed it.

Well, can't tell whether they fixed it and something else has broken now, or whether they could not fix it. Fact remains that quite a lot of sites running over that web account are down, indicating connection problems to the database. What remains for me, is to hope they can fix it again soon, so all my sites are back online. I wouldn't dream of having to relocate my bigger sites to other hosts.

Having an alternative source of information for the members and readers of your forums running on another webhost, that is not likely to break down at the same time is always a good thing. There you can inform about the problems and what you might do to solve them, like setting up an alternative at another host etc.

If you use a separate host for your domains you might even have the possibility of redirecting the domain to the alternative site, where you set up a backup to keep your forums running.

But sometimes these host problems catch you at a bad moment, where you don't have a very recent backup at hand! And with the size of your site also the difficulty grew to keep everything backed up, like attachments etc.

A tough decision is, how long to wait for the webhost to sort things out, before you take things in your own hands and move to another host.