I just want to wish everyone a happy new year and all the best for 2009. 

Now is the perfect time to set your new years resolutions and start something new for the new year.

A few of my new year resolutions have been made for the last few months and are already in execution.  So basically it will come down to maintaining them.

Good luck to all.

Labels: life, Miscellaneous, rambling

Randy Pausch gained world fame with a lecture he gave, called The Last Lecture, in September of 2007 after finding out that he had a terminal case of pancreatic cancer the summer before. 

This lecture is very motivational and a good lecture and if you have not seen it before you will enjoy it.

He recently died from the cancer on July 25th, 2008 and his memory will live on through this lecture.

Please take the hour to watch it and enjoy.

Labels: life, Miscellaneous

This weekend all of the sites I currently work on went dark!!!!  After looking into it further it was discovered that our server hosting company (the planet.com) had one of their transformers explode in their data centre and it was so big that it took down three walls.  Nobody was hurt and no hardware was destroyed but they were forced to take everything offline which affected about 9,000 sites and 7,500 clients.  Over 24 hours later and they still have not got anything running.  During that time all email, web, everything was down and there was really nothing much you could do until it was brought back up.  I feel sorry for the support guys there as this is going to be a hell of a week for them.  Sometimes just rebooting a server is stressful. 

During this downtime I got to thinking about backup plans and what you can do.  Everyone should have some sort of backup plan.  You never know what can happen.

First you should assess the possible points of failure.

1. The server hosting your site going down or being hacked and deleted.
2. The company hosting your server going down.
3. The company hosting your DNS name going down.

Next you need to address each point with your options.  In case of the three above:

1. Have a backup that is done on a regular basis stored offsite.  This way you can restore anything you need or rebuild the server with little problem.
2. Have a temporary site available that you can point your domain name to if you can handle the downtime easily.  At least this will let your visitors know that something is wrong and it is being worked on.  Sometimes it takes up to 48 hours for the DNS pointer to change but I've had pretty good luck with faster turn around times than that.  This backup site should have updates as to what is going on and possibly another email to contact in case of emergency.  Alternatively this backup site could be a full backup of your current site.
3. I don't think there is much you can really do.  This would probably be worst case scenario and would probably be a much bigger problem than your site.  :)

After this you should be able to start putting together your plans and price out any extra costs you may have. 

Backup plans aren't just for web sites.  They could be for anything in life.  Here are a few I use.

• A photocopy of every important card in my wallet.  It takes you losing your wallet one time to learn your lesson.
• I backup my main computer that I use as a server for others on a monthly basis.  It includes my music and videos and any other data that I don't want to lose to a hardware failure.
• If the Internet goes down (ISP's aren't perfect and I depend on it for work) I still have dial up access I can use as well as mobile access to my email so I can at least keep on top of things.
• Weekly backups of my main laptop in case of hardware failure.  Its a full backup using the ntbackup utility in XP.  All automatic so I never think about it.

You get the idea.  I encourage all to have a backup plan of anything you think is critical.  Remember it only takes one disaster for you to learn your lesson.  What is your plan?

Labels: backup, life, rambling, web sites