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If money were not an issue

What would you do if you had an unlimited budget?

Answering this question is a very useful exercise to see what you could get for your online presence if you had an unlimited budget.

To make it easier to digest, I will divide this exploration into a couple of categories.

 

Performance

Load balancers – for high traffic websites – make sure your customers don’t have to wait around for your pages to load.

Performance Optimization – when you need to shave off every millisecond – load speed affects conversions, making sense to have software that is as fast as possible. Performance optimization is very broad and includes items like code optimization, caching, content delivery networks, and load balancers.

Accelerated Mobile Pages – important if you care about SEO and traffic that Google sends your way. They provide a significant speed improvement, and with fast loading times, conversions also increase. This optimization works best for publishers and less for eCommerce sites.

 

Marketing and User Experience (UX)

Sales Funnels – use automatic email series to keep the conversation going with your prospects. And with conditional logic, you can tailor this conversation for each individual, so they don’t have to read through the material that is not relevant to them.

Chatbot and chat agent – leverage the power of AI to answer common questions for your visitors and customers. This bot, however, will not replace good support staff that can connect with the person on the other line. But it will offload some of the frequent questions.

Affiliate Program – selling is the most challenging process in a company, but it’s the only one that generates revenue. An affiliate program is a straightforward way to recruit a sales force that will work for you.

Correct Metadata – use the correct Metadata for your pages, making it easier to share content around social media and various content aggregators. Your content will not be noticed when placed next to someone doing a fantastic job with their meta tags if you ignore this.

Conversion tracking – if you do not set up goals and do not track how well they are doing, you will have no way of knowing what works. Every new decision will be a “wild guess” instead of an informed one. You can set up tracking using tools like Google Analytics, Facebook pixel, and in-house software.

Email Deliverability – you can be the best copywriter in the world. It will not help you if your users never get your email. Choose a good delivery service and configure things like DKIM and SPF correctly.

Advanced SEO – most modern publishing tools have built-in SEO helpers, but in some cases, more advanced tactics are needed to get that ranking you are looking for.

A/B Testing – it is best to make a decision based on your audience’s real data when possible. A/B testing helps you fine-tune your design and messaging for better conversions.

The user journey – how do people use your product or service? What can you improve that experience? The user journey experience can help you fine-tune the user experience, increasing both conversions and customer satisfaction.

 

Branding and Design

Intuitive Search – for content-heavy websites, like community forums, course libraries, and educational websites, a powerful search engine makes the difference between high engagement or content lost in inaccessible parts of your site. Most public websites rely on Google search to solve this issue for them, but what do you do if your content is private, behind a paywall? The tool to use here is Elastic Search.

Accessibility – make sure that people with disabilities can use your services. It’s not only a legal requirement in some countries, but it is also the right thing to do.

Companion App for iOS and Android – a companion app, if done right, can unlock new ways to interact with your customers and add value to them. Sometimes this is just a mobile site packed as an app. Still, a better experience is to take advantage of the many sensors on portable devices and create a unique and valuable experience.

Streamlined Checkout – don’t ask for a ton of information if all you need is an email address to deliver the digital products. There will be plenty of opportunities to collect other details later on. A streamlined checkout experience can significantly reduce the shopping cart abandonment rate.

Mobile Optimization – this term is a bit of a misnomer since you should think “mobile-first” and optimize for desktop later. But I am adding this here just in case it is not clear to you that more than half of traffic comes from mobile. Also, mobile does not mean only “small screens.” It means access to a camera, sensors, and information that you can use to create an experience that would not be possible on a desktop.

Style Guides – use style guides to ensure your look stays consistent across channels in interactions with your customers.

 

Insurance (backup and testing)

Testing – tests provide no direct benefit to either your customers or you, the website owner. Because of that, they are easily overlooked or done wrong. A broken or buggy process can cost you a fortune in lost revenue. Do your tests, and do them right. Follow this advice, and you don’t have to hope it will work; you know it will work.

  • Automated end-to-end tests – Don’t wait for a visitor to take the time to report a problem. Instead, have automated scripts that test the business-critical processes daily and immediately notify you when something breaks.
  • Stress tests – The fact that your home page feels snappy when you are the only one using it does not mean much. How will your infrastructure handle a spike in traffic? Especially in situations where you know a marketing promo will hit? Do you have auto-scale enabled? How far up should you scale? Stress tests can surface problems that only show up in high traffic situations, and they will also give you numbers you can work with when choosing the server specifications. High traffic can potentially mean lots of conversions. But it can also mean zero conversions if your server keeps crashing. That’s both revenue lost and marketing money wasted on a campaign that went nowhere.
  • Penetration tests – A good-looking snappy page is not necessarily secure. A security audit and penetration tests allow you to discover security holes and fix them before a bad actor abuses them.

GDPR compliance – obey the law. It’s cheaper than paying fines. And with a clear design, it does not have to look bad.

Resilient Design – with progressive enhancements – this is a way to future proof your web application by assuming that new technologies will emerge, so you plan to support those while not abandoning your old customer base.

Automated Backups – are the best insurance policy against data loss and security vulnerabilities. They need to be automated, so you don’t forget. And you need to test them to make sure they work.

 

Integration and Automation

Data import, export, and migration – having this in place helps you avoid lock-ins with a particular technology and provider. And it also opens up many integration possibilities with third-party tools. Being flexible makes you resilient.

Interoperability – how well do you play with others? Publishing clear and useful APIs can help increase the adoption of your service. It also increases the chance of your services being integrated and creating value in a way that you cannot foresee right now. Add artificial intelligence to the mix, and it can get exciting.

Automated email processing – for things like creating a support ticket for each email sent to a support address. Or use it for triggering processes in automated processes or for publishing content from your phone.

Support Ticket System – responding to support via email and not using a system is comfortable and easy but will hurt you in the long run. It will be impossible to track what was said to whom, and issues will fall through the cracks. Also, customers expect a premium brand to have a professional support system.

Single Sign-On – is a way to allow your users to log in once and then get access to all the relevant applications. When a visitor can signup with Google or Facebook, it reduces the friction of taking action, and it offloads the concern of storing a password to the identity provider. But be careful though, make sure your users can still log in even if they lose access to their email and that you own your audience, not the identity provider.

Administrative Dashboards – are dedicated applications or pages that will give you an overview of how your website performs. How are your metrics doing, and what are the outstanding issues.

RSS Feed – a free way to make your content discoverable and accessible for anyone interested. I believe this is an undervalued and underused feature. It allows your readers to stay in direct touch with you, and you don’t have to pay for a newsletter service or boost your posts. RSS is the readers’ equivalent for podcasts (and they use, in fact, the same technology).

Web Push – the ability to send web notifications to your users, even if they have closed your website. It is still new, and it still has impressive conversion rates. (At the moment, it only works on desktop browsers and Android). Don’t be spammy, though, as the users can block them with a click, and getting unblocked is not very easy.

Scheduled tasks – send daily reports, check website integrity, run maintenance tasks. Anything that you find yourself regularly doing should be programmed in as a scheduled task, especially backups. You can use cron jobs or an automation platform like Zapier for these.

Automatic content distribution – you don’t have to share your content on all the social media accounts manually. You can, and you should use tools that do this automatically.

 

Security

Security Audit – a security audit can help uncover problems that can only be discovered by looking at your code and software, and hardware architecture. This audit becomes crucial if you deal with very sensitive data, and a breach would cost you more than having regular security audits and penetration testing.

The criteria I use when choosing a web hosting company

When choosing your web hosting company, it is useful to have your list of criteria well defined. 

You need to have this list before you start shopping around, or else you will be sold features you don’t need and, worse, missing business-critical ones. 

Below are my prioritized list and some notes. Keep in mind that as a developer, I prioritize flexibility over ease-of-use. 

  1. Enough disk space for what the website needs. When starting, 20GB+ will work.
  2. MySQL database – I don’t think there is any hosting without this, but make sure you have it.
  3. Speed – this usually translates into have SSD drives on the server.
  4. SSH access – I need this for automated backups and for the flexibility to add automatic maintenance script on the server. 
  5. Ability to send email – be careful with this; some hosting do give you this feature on paper, but it is not actually working because the email gets discarded on its way out, and there is no back reporting on it. If you have an online store and you need to send out order confirmations, lost email can be very frustrating to you and your customers. 
  6. cPanel access – I need this as a developer because I manage many websites, across many servers, and it is faster for me to work with a familiar piece of software. When cPanel is an option, I know I can set-up things quickly, and there are also plenty of diagnosing tools. Even if you are not a developer, you will likely hire one at some point, and it will be easier for them to help you with cPanel access. There is one more reason to have cPanel. And that is, you can quickly move to another hosting company, by simply exporting your cPanel data from the current hosting and importing it on the new one. Without this option, moving to a new hosting company can be troublesome and time costly. 
  7. Let’s Encrypt feature for automatic HTTPS – this important to have, or you will need to pay additional hundreds of dollars for it. 
  8. On-demand backups; You need to be able to do a full account backup at any time and do this for free. Backups are a form of insurance, don’t underestimate them. 
  9. Excellent support – this is close to the last option because if I have the ones above, I can usually sort out any issues by myself. But you may want this much higher on your list.
  10. Unlimited (or alt least 3) subdomains. Subdomains can be used for testing something out of sight from the main website. They can be used for multi-language websites. For memberships set-up. And in advanced cases for performance reasons. So make sure you can have some.
  11. And finally, there is price. I’ve learned my lesson well: cheap web hosting will cost you more in the long run, in lost business, frustration, and customer satisfaction.

If you plan to use a WordPress site, the hosting I am recommending right now is SiteGround. It meets my criteria as a developer, but it is also friendly enough to recommend it to non-developers, because of their fantastic support. 

The Process – A project from start to finish

There is value in having a process. It helps you provide consistent results, and you have something that you can continuously work on to improve. 

Here is “The Process” that I use today with software projects.

1. Are we a good fit? 

The first thing that happens is the discussion where both myself and the client try to determine if we are a good fit for one another. 

My job is to determine what the client needs and consider if I can provide a creative solution to solve that problem at a price that is fair for both of us. 

Sometimes this discussion happens in two parts if I need a break to do some research and investigation before I can begin to think of ways I could help. 

An important note here is that what is “needed” may not be what the client initial thought may be needed. That is why we have a conversation before any agreement happens. 

2. Project Set-Up 

After we agree on scope, price, and what it means to be 100% satisfied, I begin the work. 

With time I have learned the value of keeping things organized and tidy. 

Each client gets their individual folder that will document the history of the project. In that folder I will have things like:

  • meeting notes; 
  • agreement of project scope and price;
  • backups – I never do any changes unless I have a backup first;
  • client files – images, documents, other media;
  • a work-log – where I document what I have done and why. In very rare cases, I can use that to remind the client of the road we took together and justify a decision over the other. Another benefit is that you learn and get better by journaling what you do; 
  • access details – a file where I store various logins that the client has shared with me. In some cases, it makes good sense to have this file encrypted, like a ZIP archive with a password, for example;
  • any new agreed-upon changes also go here;

3. Making a plan – The List

I was trained, mostly by my father, to be organized by using lists. And I have kept that training and added on top of it. It is very useful, and it gives me clarity on what it needs to be done and in what order. 

Here I make a list of everything that needs to be done, broken down in tasks. The tool I use most of the time is Asana. I have tried Trello and Bootcamp, but I find Asana to be much closer to how I like to work. 

I also use a calendar service (like Google Calendar) to remind myself of upcoming deadlines.

Something that I found is handy is to split my list into three main sections:

 a. Go Live – the project cannot go live or shipped if any of the tasks here are not finished;

 b. Nice to Have – other tasks originating from the client that we can add later, after the go-live and in, some cases, in a “Phase 2” of the project;

 c. Bright Ideas – here I write down my own ideas that I think could help the client;

Why am I organizing things like this? 

The short answer is that it forces me to focus on the client; to get them on the market as soon as possible. I did not always use to think like that, and I was routinely making the mistake of focusing on tasks in the “Bright Ideas” section because there were so inspiring to me and they would challenge me. But in most cases, they were not mandatory for the client. So that added unjustified delays and extra costs. While I don’t think the client is always right, I do believe the client knows what is important to them. And that is where my focus should be and what I should be solving first. 

I hope it is now evident that the order in which I go about these tasks is: Go Live, then Nice To Have and then Bright Ideas. And I have learned to be OK with the fact that most projects stop after the “Go Live” part when the burning need of the client has been met. 

So why still keep “Nice to have” and “Bright Ideas” around? 

The biggest reason is to clear your mind so you can focus on the tasks at hand, knowing that your “good thoughts” are not lost. The second big reason is that is how you learn and grow. Maybe you don’t implement these ideas now, in this project, but because you wrote them down and thought about them you will remember them, and they may be the perfect solution for the next project or the “Phase 2” of this project. The “Bright Ideas” section is your most creative section. Don’t throw it away.

4. Set Up a Schedule 

I believe that if a project does not have a deadline, it will never finish. I am very wary of clients who say: “we can finish this whenever… no rush!”. That can be a source of significant delays for you and the project. 

I know this is not the same for everyone, but if deadlines motivate you, a client who is continuously delaying the project will drive you mad. 

In this step, I set-up reminders in my calendar for milestones that will help me get the work done in time for launch. 

When I do this, I need to allow time for the “unexpected” right before the launch. So I plan to finish the project at least a few days early to have some space to extend in case of unforeseen trouble. 

5. Doing the work

Only in step 5 comes the most fun part for me, doing software work :). But as a solopreneur, I need to do and master the business admin part as well.

When doing software work, I have a few principles that I follow:

  • Blocks of uninterrupted time – 2 – 3 hours blocks when I am the most efficient. When coding, there is a complex context that you need to have running in your head, and that takes time to build. If your block of time is too short, then most of that is spent just reminding yourself what the project is about;
  • use a versioning system – this should be obvious – even if you are working alone, it is so much easier to roll back to something that was working when you have a versioning system in place 
  • automatic testing – for particular clients that require a very high level of quality control this needs to be done;
  • Automatic backups of the client’s old code/website – again, just in case you need to roll back. Make sure the backups also include the database, not just the code files;
  • Keep track of working time – in some cases, “hours of time” is what I am billing to the client, and also this is how I know if we are going to finish on time. I am however transitioning out of this, so stay tuned for a post about it. Keeping track of time can be a learning and discipline building tool, just like journaling your work, but sometimes it becomes very, very restrictive and creates a lot of stress; 

6. Client Feedback 

I used to work, work, work, and then do the “big WOW” reveal at the end when the client would be floored with the amazing quality and results. 

This big reveal was silly. 

Why? Because it would allow me to focus on the “Bright Ideas” list instead of “Go Live.” And I would deliver an excellent, high-quality product, that would not speak to the client’s needs. 

What I do now is to deliver work in smaller increments and get feedback soon and often. I am careful here that the feedback I am looking for is “does this meet your needs, madam client?” and not about “how to do my job.” Therefore it is a tool to keep me focused on finding solutions that are important and relevant to the client. 

7. Making mistakes 

Mistakes are happening in every project. If I am not making mistakes, I am not learning anything new, and I am just delivering the same old solution. In some cases, that is OK, but generally, that is not what I am looking for. Each client is unique, so I want to challenge myself and meet their individual needs. 

It is therefore essential to know that I will be making mistakes and have a plan on what do to about them. Like, make sure I have factored that in the price so I don’t add more as a cost to the client to fix them. Also, I need to include those in my schedule. That is why I always have the “unexpected problem” in my planing with some time allocated to it. 

I am, however, fair. If I make a stupid mistake that I could have easily foreseen and avoided, the fix is on the house! I am talking here about the unavoidable trials and errors when you are building custom solutions and exploring places you have not explored before. Those mistakes need to be allowed for if you want to arrive at a good solution where you have explored alternatives that did not work. 

8. Going Live 

When I “go live,” I strive to have a seamless experience for the customer and their clients, which means as little to no downtime if that is at all possible. Over time I have discovered various ways of “flipping the switch” that can use depending on the specific situation. 

Again here, backups are super important. In case you mess up the live deployment, you need to be sure you can roll back to what worked before. I have seen so many instances where this not done, and people roll the dice. They may be that good, but it is just a matter of “when” things will crash on you, not “if.” I have learned my lesson.

9. Review and Learn

Ideally, the project has completed with the “double thank you.” You give thanks for the business, and the client is grateful for the solution they got. 

Either way now is the time to reflect on the project and look for “lessons learned.” 

What worked? Do more of that!

What did not work? Do less of that! 🙂 Or at least try to figure out what you can do differently next time. 

Something else that shows up here is opportunities to learn new things. Look at the “Bright Ideas” section and the “Nice to Have” section and try to come up with solutions to those that use new technologies. I sometimes set-up a pet project where I implement that solution.

I mustn’t skip this step or else I would get stuck in a rut. 

Mic to you!

How is your process different when you’re helping your clients? What are some of your lessons learned along your journey? 

Keep your site up to date – good advice, but only in theory?

“Keep your software up to date!”

I am sure you have heard this saying many times, and in general, it is good advice.

However, let’s take a WordPress website, for example.

A WordPress site is made from the WordPress core and usually many plugins. You have many pieces in your puzzle. Not all of them are updated at the same time or in the same way.

In my experience, it happened more than once that an updated piece no longer fit with the rest of the puzzle. Auch!

Most update processes do a good job warning you that you need to do a backup first and to ensure the other plugins (components of the puzzle) are compatible with the update.

This approach puts the responsibility of “making sure that things still work” with the user. And not everyone can make that assessment. Also, let’s admit it, sometimes we are in a hurry or just plain lazy :). Ideally, a piece of software should not rely on a human to do the right thing.

I too used to be overconfident in the automatic updates process, and I would apply those every time there was a new update. Click, click, and I was done! What could possibly go wrong?

One time, I updated the store. We had a newsletter scheduled that we expected to generate much interest and I thought I wanted to offer the best and latest shopping experience for our customers. So I updated the store and was on my way. The next day I opened the email to a ton of complaints from our subscribers that the checkout is not working! A full email campaign wasted, not the mention that we looked totally unprofessional — that hurt both my ego and the sales.

What did I learn from it?

1. Updates can potentially be very painful

2. You never change the system right before a big promo campaign. (This feels like common sense now.)

3. You need to be extra careful when you update the part that generates income: the store, the “pay now buttons,” and the subscribe boxes.

4. After you update you need to test at least the critical functionality: add to cart, checkout, subscribe.

5. You better have good backups, in case you need to roll back.

It was not all bad, because I did have backups, so it was relatively easy to go back to the previous version. Moreover, I sent another email campaign with an apology and a second invitation to check out the offer. If I hadn’t had backups that would not have been possible to do.

Another thing I decided to implement is to write automatic tests for the website that can run in the background and make sure the critical processes are still working.

In conclusion: stay up to date, but be smart about it 🙂

Versioned Backups – A form of Insurance

What are version backups and why should your online business care?

Allow me to share a story with you. One morning I get a call for a client of mine. A website they were maintaining had bad been hacked. The service they were providing was not working anymore and they were losing the trust of their customers. They were asking me to fix it for them.

Fixing a hacked website is very difficult and time-consuming and it can mean a lot of downtime. The better option was to restore the site to a previous state when everything was working.

Thankfully this client understood the value of backups so he had one. Took me an hour to restore the backup. And when we checked the site…

Surprise!

It was still looking bad and the browser was still issuing security complaints. Auch!!

It became clear that the hack had happened a more than a week ago, so restoring the most recent backup did us no good.

And here come the versioned backups. Which is a fancy name for backups that go back in time. You don’t have only the latest backups, you have a daily backup for the last 30 days or a weekly backup for the last 10 weeks.

Because we had those I was able to discover when the hack took place and restore the backup before this. Another 2 hours spent, but now the website was working again.

After one more hour, I discovered that one of the plugins installed had a security flaw that had been exploited. I had to disable and delete that plugin or the site would have been hacked again shortly.

Versioned backups are snapshots of your website across time where you keep more than just the last one.

As you can see, this allows you to reach back in time to when “things were working” and restore your data in case of trouble, even if you discover the issue a few days after the fact.

Why should your online business care about versioned backups?

If your website is mostly static and you don’t offer any services online then you don’t need versioned backups. Just an old backup from last year will do the job.

But let’s be honest. Most websites are in fact web-applications. Meaning they are not just static pages. There is content that is updated, products that are promoted, customer lists, fulfilled orders, and invoices. And if you are doing well, these get updated at least once a day. So a backup from last year will help, but you will still lose a lot of your data.

Depending on how you run your online business and the amount of online activity you will have to decide how often to backup and for how long to keep a backup history.

In my experience so far, with small and medium-sized businesses, doing weekly backups and keeping only the last 4 works very well. This means that in the worst-case scenario you can go back a month, and in the best-case scenario you lose a week of your data: new posts, customers and sales.

But I am paranoid and what I usually do is daily backups that I keep for 2 or 3 months.

Lots of backups and a long history sounds good a reassuring. But there is a cost to that in time and resources. Your server needs to work (sometimes hard) to generate the backup, and then you need the storage space to keep al that history. That is why you need to strike a balance between your real business needs and your peace of mind.

The Take-Away

Versioned backups are a good form of insurance because sometimes the ‘latest backup’ is just as bad as the live website.

Website maintenance for WordPress

Gone are the days when you would set up your web pages and you would be done for the next 10 years or so. In today’s world, most websites require some sort of maintenance work and that is especially true for WordPress.

Why is maintenance important?

The number one reason is security. Your site is not alone. It exists in an ecosystem and it is connected with many other systems for it to work and do its job. All of this is in a continuous state of change. Change means that potentially new software problems are introduced that could affect your site. This change also means that new security exploits are discovered that could make your site vulnerable.

Unless you are a security expert and keeping on top of web security issues is your job, it is a daunting task to keep up with all this change. I get it. But that is no reason to just give up on it entirely.

At the very least keep your website components updated (core and plugins) and have good backups in place [link to backups].

The second reason is to continue to be relevant. As the services and business around you evolve, your website needs to evolve to keep up or even to lead the way. So maintenance, in this case, can go from simple website updates to constant incremental improvements so that your users’ experience gets better and better. The most common issue here is that integration points with other services change and without a maintenance plan in place, your site would just stop working at some point.

The third reason is to make sure your website is still functioning properly. You don’t want to hear from your customers that your store is not working. How many sales did you lose before someone took the time to contact you? You don’t want to wait months to discover your most valuable page is broken and so Google dropped it from the search index. The solution here is to have a test plan in place. Once a week you could check your home page, your purchase process, and the signup process and make sure they work. For bigger businesses, an automated test plan may be a better solution.

The Cost of Website maintenance

There is a cost for maintenance. That is time if you need to do it yourself, or money, if you need to hire someone to do it for you.

Instead of thinking just in terms of costs and maybe decide not to do it, ask yourself how much would it cost you in the long run *not* to maintain your website. In that sense, maintenance is a form of insurance that you pay for your peace of mind. It can also be an investment that you make in your business growth.

How to do it?

At the most basic level, you need to keep your software updated. For WordPress, that means updating to the latest stable version, and also updating your plugins. It also means that you delete (not just deactivate) old plugins that you no longer use.

A more intermediate level would also include some database operations to keep lean, optimized and fast.

For more advanced users you may have to hire someone to do this for you constantly: monitor the uptime, make sure that the core business processes are still functioning, check the integration points and update the software as required, optimize for performance and so on.

The Take-Away

Don’t ignore maintenance. When you build a new website make sure you include a budget for it and that you also discuss it with your developer. And if you already have a website, you should also have a maintenance plan in place.

Do you have any “lessons learned” the hard way? I’d love to hear about them in the comments below.

To Backup or not to Backup

Some years ago I had the opportunity to work alongside a veteran software developer. That was a treat for me and also a way to learn big lessons fast.

I remember being overconfident in my abilities, fresh out of school, and making silly mistakes when all that knowledge had to be put into practice.

I wanted to be quick, and agile, and free! I wanted to get in, fix the problem and move on!

But there was an incident that taught me a valuable lesson.

The server we were managing got hacked and crashed.

Working alongside the Veteran we managed to identify the security vulnerability, fix it and then restore the website within 6 hours. This was a big and popular forum. 6 hours recovery time was much shorter than the couple of days that this usually takes.

Shortly after restoring access, I heard from one of the members saying: “The way you recovered from this and the speed at which you did it is nothing short of impressive. In my career, I have worked for big software companies and none of them have in place such a good recovery plan.”

I could not take much credit for that, so I decided to pay attention to “the Old Veteran” because it was clear now he knew was he was doing :).

The Importance of Backups

We were able to bounce back so quickly because we had backups. Now only that, but we had versioned backups. Meaning we could go “back in time” to before the problem, see what changed and fix it. And then restore almost all of the user data, with minimal loss. Without versioned backups, this process would have been long and tedious and I do not know if we would have been able to spot the point of entry.

This is a happy ending story and here is what I have learned:

1. You always do backups – even if you think you don’t need them.

2. You test your backups – an untested backup is no backup. I have a story here where a client was paying their hosting company for a remote backup system and when the time came to use it, the backups were corrupted and so not usable.

3. You never delete things – you rename them and then archive them – this way you can always retrace your steps back to something that was working

4. When writing software you always, always use source control – which is basically a system that does smart backups of your work that allow you to “go back in time” and fix problems.

A beginner’s mistake- “I am too good for Backups”

As I have said, fresh out of school, I had bright ideas and I wanted to move very fast, but I did not ever have to deliver work that was used by real people, in a real situation, facing potential attacks from real online threats.

When you are prototyping and testing out an idea, it is OK to be quick, because if the idea is bad or not useful, you need to find out fast. But once you have something that you want to build out for the long term, then you need to switch gears and sacrifice reaction speed for being more organized.

I confess that this did not make sense to me for a long time. But as I worked in bigger and bigger projects it became obvious how the “slow work” of thinking of a structure to organize your code, setting up source control and doing backups was actually the fast lane. Why? Because it reduces risk and allows you to easily maintain the project as you move forward.

The opposite of this is working at neck-breaking speed, not “wasting time” with backups or source control, in order to put something on the market quickly. All the projects that I managed or I was a part of, that did not put in the time to be organized, eventually ground to a halt and had to be abandoned or rewritten.

I have done this mistake enough times to learn my lesson: for quality and sustainable work always do backups and use source control.

Client’s point of view – Do backups make business sense?

It is now obvious for me that backups are not just a good idea. But why should you care about them?

It depends on how well you can manage risk and how important is your data and your customers’ data to you and your business.

If you can afford to lose it all, then you don’t need backups.

If you can afford the downtime of having to rebuild your application from scratch, then you don’t need backups.

But in my opinion, good backups are a cost-effective way to mitigate the security and data loss risks associated with running an online business.

Do you have a backup policy in place? And if you do, have you tested your backups lately to make sure that you will find in there what you expect to find?