Keeping everything working on a Web site can involve a lot of moving parts. Maybe I should rephrase that to say aligning a lot of clouds. Last week there was a massive fire at the OVHcloud data center in Strasburg, France. Unleashed hosts all of their sites in North America so it shouldn’t seem like it would be an issue for us. Unfortunately our partner, MR Clipart, hosts everything related to their vehicle templates in that data center.
This meant that users were not able to search for vehicle templates nor could they download vehicle templates. We talked to many of you during this downtime because we didn’t know for sure when they would have the site restored. Keep in mind that the first step is having a backup. Yes, they had one. Then all of the site and the data has to be uploaded. Given the amount of data, this takes a long time.
After a few days, the site is back online and working well. Because of this outage, we’re going to have a “fire” sale. From March 15, 2021 – March 31, 2021 you can get one year subscriptions for $99 and lifetime subscriptions for $399. Take advantage of the sale pricing to renew for another full year or jump to a lifetime subscription.
Now that the sale announcement is covered, it is time to look at how any of us are prepared for a disaster like this. Is your data safe in case of a disaster? VentureBeat wrote a good article titled Cloudburst: Hard lessons learned from the OVH datacenter blaze. If you keep a lot of data in your shop, make sure you have a solid backup plan. For those with Web sites, make sure they are backed up and the back ups stored in multiple locations. Should disaster strike, you’ll be prepared. Not backing up could lead to a very costly disaster.
Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash
