Advice For Site Owners
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Blogging
So I’ve been through the ringer this weekend trying to figure out what went wrong and how I can avoid it next time. Here are a few pieces of advice from somebody who got caught off guard and should have known better.
Quite possibly the safest thing to do if you want to start a blog is host your site over at a place like wordpress.com or blogspot.com. That way the responsibility for your content’s security is in the hands of people who will lose their job if it gets lost. That doesn’t mean it’s 100% safe, but what in this world is? Just make sure you have some crazy login password that’s long and not linked to anything somebody could guess. Like 5hsJ73n6DrrE1 or something similarly indecipherable.
However, there are issues with hosting solutions like wordpress.com and blogpost.com. First, they usually have existing templates which are hard to modify and make unique. Most people don’t care about that. I do. Also, they sometimes don’t allow you to use advertising modules. For instance, a site I know hosted on wordpress.com can’t use TheNewsRoom’s content/advertising solutions. They simply just won’t load. And that’s unfortunate because with the amount of traffic he gets, it could really help him out.
That brings us to hosting a blog with a service like Media Temple, Hosting.com, etc. If you do this, make sure your hosting service allows you to do a very simple backup of your database and blogging template. And if you go with a solution like this, you’ll want to do a backup of your site’s content every single night. That way if somebody does figure out a way to get in, the most you’ve lost is a few posts. Trust me, this is what I’ll be doing every single night from here on out. It’ll take 5 minutes tops and I’ll be able to sleep comfortably knowing that nobody will be able to wipe Donklephant off the web.
So there you have it folks. I’m going to get back to my regular posting now, and hopefully I’ll be able to restore the month’s worth of content that was lost in the next few days or so. But if not, well, it’s a good lesson and one I won’t ever forget.
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
October 21st, 2007 at 12:11 pm
Thanks for sharing that advice. I think I’ll have to look into backing up regularly. I hope you can restore everything.
October 21st, 2007 at 5:47 pm
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October 24th, 2007 at 6:12 am
Bummer for you, sage advice though.
I am spurred to action.
Thanks.
Chris.