Choose your Web Hosting Company Wisely

Last month, the web hosting company 2ip lost all data for their subscribers. Yes they were doing backups, but there were some security issues which made the back-up data unusable. You can read their explanation here.

This resulted in sites who were hosted by this company to essentially lose all their data. I first became aware of this when I visited Storiesville to catch up on some casual reading. Storiesville was a user-contributed fiction site and now its completely gone (along with many wonderful pieces of user-generated fiction that where there).

Even prior to this hacking event, this hosting company had numerous published complaints on the web. However they were one of the cheapest web hosts on the web, which made them attractive to many people. Now that leads me to my point. Sometimes you need to pay a little extra for something as important as web hosting.

So don’t skimp on the hosting service. A web hosting company that is offering rock bottom hosting prices is probably skimping somewhere. It may be in equipment, staffing, or in data protection, but you can assume they are cutting corners somewhere.

If you have a home based business website, especially one where you’ve generated a lot of content yourself or hired someone to write content, you can’t afford to wake up one day and find your site gone. Make sure your hosting company is doing an adequate job of backing up your data and creating enough redundant systems to guard against the kind of catastrophic loss that happened with 2ip.

For the record, 2ip is offering a year of free hosting to its affected clients with another hosting company. But nothing can replace the data that was lost in this unfortunate incident.