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August 17, 2006
When Surprise Strikes: Protecting your blog from devastating events
Over the past few weeks, we at BizNicheMedia have been recovering from the India's response to the Mumbai terrorist attacks. In an attempt to stop terror cells from communicating via blogs, India inadvertently blocked the entire country's access to all blogs for almost two weeks. As a result, our writing team was no longer able to access their blogs and immediately BizNicheMedia started suffering in terms of both traffic and revenues. Needless to say, we were surprised by our own fragility.
This swiftness with which our network collapsed got us thinking...
If we were caught off guard by this unexpected event, are we prepared for future surprises?
So our management team began collaborating to come up with backup plans, so that in case of any future emergency, the network will be prepared. If you are thinking about setting up contingency plans for your own blogs, you might want to consider some steps we took:
- Keep TWO backups of your blog. Backup your posts not only on your work computer, but either online or in an entirely separate computer. That way no single computer crash, virus, or accessability problem can take down the content on the blog if your platform should crash.
- Develop a list of MULTINATIONAL guest bloggers. The Indian shutdown made it apparent to us that simply creating a list of guest bloggers that you can call on isn't enough. Instead, a blog owner needs to be able to call upon bloggers from at least two and ideally three different countries to fill in. That way, no single domestic or regional event can shut your blog down.
- Store EVERGREEN posts for emergencies. For larger networks, a few guest bloggers simply cannot keep up with the number of posts which need to be written. So, we try to keep at least 2 weeks of evergreen posts (read: not time sensitive) so that we have enough time to take the necessary steps in the event of an emergency.
- Eliminate reliances on SINGLE individuals. We revised our pay system, linkbuilding efforts, and writer management so that the loss of any single individual due to sudden illness or otherwise will not require someone wholly unaquainted with the system to be trained. Instead, we have at least two people fully capable of fulfilling any necessary task at all times.
- CONTINUALLY assess new weaknesses. BiznicheMedia has implemented a monthly review wherein every member of the management team sits down and discusses potential vulnerabilities to the network, and steps we can take to protect ourselves.
If the blogging community wants to expand its reach both in terms of audience and in developing its reputation as a reliable source of news and information, we must be prepared for the unexpected. Recent experience has taught us that being unprepared can be devastating, and we are taking the necessary steps to ensure that these kinds of surprises never happen again.
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Comments
Have you considered cycling through your reserve posts every couple of months? I do that for my own blog, because even the most evergreen content can get dated.
Posted by: Jo Nathan | Aug 18, 2006 10:49:53 AM
Jo,
Since this is a new program we haven't worked out all the details quite yet, however, one of the keys to making this work is ensuring that these backup plans are as low maintenance as possible. So without looking too much into it, I might say that keeping a constantly revolving set of backups might require a bit more attention than is needed for this, especially because it is a backup contingency.
Posted by: Rich | Aug 18, 2006 10:52:03 AM
I had no idea the fallout was that bad. Glad to hear you guys turned it around quickly though.
Posted by: John Skakun | Aug 18, 2006 4:44:44 PM
So far I have heard that they have blocked only those blogs which could have been owned by terrorist islamic group or probably relevant personal blogs. Whatsoever it may be its better to prepare for future surprise any way.
Posted by: eTechSupport | Aug 21, 2006 10:14:31 AM
eTechSupport,
That is the official line, but the reality is that for a time almost every blog was blocked and depending on the ISP, some remain blocked still. (Though they can all be accessed via proxies)
Rich
Posted by: Rich | Aug 21, 2006 6:56:59 PM
I think instead of banning blogs the intelligence department should have accessed those blog sites which were suscpicious and supposed to be used by extermists to spread any message to track them. By any means they should have not banned it as atleast people would have used the blogs to communicate their relatives and friends those who were victim of terrorist attack any way as the day of attack all cell phone were dead for hours.
Posted by: chitragupta sinha | Aug 22, 2006 7:16:00 AM
Thanks. I summarized your lessons in a post at my blog. I'm impressed that Know More Media should make sure we're prepared for anything to happen, too.
Posted by: Easton Ellsworth | Aug 22, 2006 4:22:12 PM
I remember some bloggers with heavy traffic were running parallel blogs on proxy servers. I didn't explore much into that but it can be a viable option.
Posted by: Amrit Hallan | Aug 23, 2006 9:34:09 AM
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Posted by: 鲜花 | Sep 17, 2006 4:43:25 PM
The perfect tool for your blog backup is SiteVault ( http://www.site-vault.com ). It takes a bit to configure but you can just forget about it until you need the latest backup restored ;).
George
Posted by: WebSite Backup | Nov 13, 2006 8:16:49 AM
So far ive had websites get hacked by fishing companies posing as banks. In some cases i just deleted the files in other cases had to start the site over. Keep your ftp password really well coded as i think they figure out the ftp passwords.
Posted by: articles directory | Jan 23, 2008 8:36:33 PM
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