How would you cope if your business went offline for a week?

It's likely that some new customers wouldn't be able to find you online and so you would miss out on some additional income. More likely and perhaps more importantly, you would be without your e-mail accounts and that would cause all sorts of issues, including stopping you from completing admin, finance and customer service tasks.

Back in February last year Heart Internet, one of the UK's largest domain, hosting and web site companies went down for five days.

A similar incident happened in April with 123-Reg when they accidentally deleted thousands of their customers' web sites. Everything was lost - all of their web sites, databases and e-mails. Worse still was that 123-Reg didn't have a backup so people had no choice but to start again with everything.

That's a nightmare scenario and like all of us, those customers have now probably put extra measures in place to ensure that they do not get 'bitten' by a similar incident in the future.

WHAT WE DO

We are well aware of how an incident such as those that affected Heart and 123 customers can affect businesses and it's our job to make sure that never happens. Here are some of the safeguards that we have in place:

• Our servers have numerous redundancy features including redundant power supplies and network cards meaning that if there is a hardware failure, there won't be any downtime. We simply replace the faulty component with a new one, all the while the spare component takes over
• We backup each of our customer's web sites four times a day. That's once every six hours so if something did go wrong, we have plenty of backups to restore from
• We actively maintain and monitor all of our web sites. We ensure that they are kept up-to-date with the latest software versions
• We install firewall and virus software not only on the server but on each individual web site to keep them secure from hackers

All of these measures mean that our customers can be confident that their web site will stay online and secure.