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Through the years, we have had the privelage of being hacked at least three times that I remember.  Each time, we learn something new about how we are running our business.

What if your webserver or website was hacked tonight?  Do you have back ups?  Is your list maintained on a third party provider like AWeber?  Are you saving your lists on AWeber periodically?

The content we create, and the list we build are the lifeblood of an online business.

Unfortunately, a hacker doesn’t follow a schedule and it seems they attack at the most inconvenient time.

If you have multiple sites, are all your sites hosted on the same webserver/reseller account?  If so, you may be setting yourself up for a domino effect as one gets hacked, they all get hacked.  Our latest attack earlier this year was the worst ever, we lost an entire dedicated server with an unrecoverable error.  The hacker was very good and attacked the boot sector of the server.  This crippled the server so bad it could only be booted from within the data center using a restore disk.  We were able to get an emergency backup, but it ammounted to 8 terabytes of data from our websites and databases.  That is not an easy amount of data to FTP to another server.

We are now in the process of downsizing to a single dedicated server and choosing hosting for individual sites with hosting around the world.  This also gives us an opportunity for even better SEO by linking the sites togethor from different hosting providers.  While this poses a management challenge, I am currently designing a portal to manage our sites across hosting providers.  Time will tell if we are able to implement the new portal, but we find it neccessary in order to effectively manage our business.

So, in closing, take some time this weekend and layout your backup plan for your websites and data including your pc/laptop.  I can tell you from experience, you don’t want to wait until it is too late.

Kevin