I want to put as much of a positive spin on this blog as i can. But sometimes reality is a tough pill to swallow.

The Connected Business support team had a long time 'self hosted' customer call us with the words no support person wants to hear... "... company down". The customer experienced a power outage while in the middle of production. This specific customer processes several hundred orders from eBay each day and they were not able to download and fulfill their orders which was hurting their ratings with eBay. They needed help and they needed it fast. The story gets worse before it gets better.

Our support team does a really good job of reacting to situations not always knowing what to expect. Nine out of ten times the solution is either a Microsoft patch that changed framework permissions, a new GP (group policy) change from a system admin, or a firewall/router change. In this case, it was evident none of these were the factor. A lead dev for Connected Business did the initial analysis and found that the SQL Server database had corruption at the page file level. I am here to tell you SQL Server, to me, is the best product you can buy from Microsoft. I don't want to use the words 'bullet proof', but when you play by the rules of HA and DR (high availability and disaster recovery), you greatly reduce your companies risk of company downtime, rework, and loss of productivity. In this case, the customer had never done a SQL Server backup in the years they hosted their database internally. There was no power redundancy. More so, the settings on their SQL Server were set for the most optimized settings (less caching). This is acceptable when you have an HA environment where if a disk or power supply fails there are others there to pick up the slack. This configuration could not have been setup less favorably than it was.

For those that know me and have attended one of our conferences in the past couple of years, the setup/hosting conversations are all about doing what's right for your company, but only if you do it right. I used to teach software development at a tech college. The students always asked me "how often should we backup our dev environment and databases?" My answer was "only as far back as you care to do rework". And if self hosting is the right thing for your company, do it right. There are several no-brainer data storage options out there charging only pennies per GB/month. There are several 3rd party tools (also very inexpensive) that would have made this companies mishap a mere annoyance of an hour or so. At this time they are facing a re-implementation strategy, rewriting plug-ins and reports, and lastly finding a way to get the orders they needed to manually ship back into their new production database.

I wrote this article with one intent and that's AWARENESS! I want everyone to be aware of how fragile their business can be when you don't do the basic things to protect your business software investment. I have also started a new program effective immediately for a low monthly fee, I will work with you to create a database backup strategy that includes putting your backups on the Connected Business servers. Cost will depend on the amount of data. If you have a disaster situation with your internal hosting, I will re-hydrate your latest database/application in our hosted environment until you are able to straighten out your internal issues... at which time we will transfer the db back to you with little downtime. We know how to host our application and for most this should be the "EASY BUTTON" you are looking for. This program is pretty much a reaction to last weeks events as I never want any customer to go thru what the customer above is facing.

If you are interested, please contact me directly and we can discuss the details. Depending on your infrastructure, there are several options I can think of and I will work with you to create the right backup strategy for your company. It can be more than your SQL Server and website data. Solid disaster recovery is not accident. Even if you think you have a backup plan I want you to ask yourself... "Have I tested it?" "Have I brought the system up live on a different server farm successfully?" If the answer is yes, I applaud you. If the answer is no, I suggest we have a conversation. We can have something in place pretty much the same day, with a polished solution within a week. It all depends on your environment.

I don't want anyone to go through what our friend is going through now. If you self-host, let's talk.

Curt Rice

VP of Technical Services