Your hosting has a decisive impact on your online sales performance: the speed at which your pages load has an impact on your natural referencing, and temporary or prolonged unavailability of your website in the event of an incident represents a risk that could cause irreversible damage and considerable financial loss. In this article, we'll look at the importance of adopting a backup strategy adapted to your hosting, so you can anticipate the risks.
Why backup your website?
IT equipment market under pressure since late 2019
The health crisis and associated confinements generated a sudden and unexpected spike in demand for IT equipment, both in the professional and private sectors. Production came under strain, resulting in a shortage of electronic components. The situation is still alarming today, due to the war in Ukraine and the resurgence of Covid in China.
The lack of electronic components has a direct impact on the security of digital operations. Many electronic chips are used for this purpose (bank cards, SIM cards, connected objects, etc.). This phenomenon increases the risk of hackers taking advantage of equipment that is easier to hack.
Remember the OVH fire in March 2021!
No company is immune to breakdowns, accidental deletions, server crashes or hacking! Remember the fire on March 10, 2021, which destroyed part of the OVH Cloud datacenters in Strasbourg. In its first press release immediately after the fire, OVH invited its customers to "activate their DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan)". Many OVH customers did not have one, and simply lost 100% of their data. Others, on the contrary, were able to restart their business in less than an hour thanks to the DRP.
According to Netcraft, an American Internet monitoring specialist: "3.6 million HTTP servers representing 464,000 domain names went offline. (...) More than 18% of the IP addresses attributed to OVH in our latest Web Server Survey published two weeks ago were no longer responding on March 10 between 7 and 8 a.m." According to OVH, on the other hand, between 12,000 and 16,000 customers were affected*.
It's essential to take the backup and security of your equipment and data seriously, and to benefit from immediate business resumption and application availability in the event of any incident. Without good backup management, you're putting your business at risk.
Focus on Cyber Security
Among companies that have been victims of a cyber-attack, 1 in 6 said their survival was threatened.
Ransomware is now commonplace.
- 16% of attacked companies suffered a ransomware attack.
- 58% of affected companies paid a ransom, either to recover data or to prevent the publication of sensitive information.
- 23% of companies mentioned bad publicity and its impact on the company's brand image and reputation (versus 14% in 2020).
Secure your data and anticipate risks
What is a good back-up and why set up a DRP?
Hosting a site does not mean backing it up, but providing storage space on servers.
Depending on the application you use (WordPress, Prestashop...) and the type of hosting you subscribe to (shared or dedicated server/VM), your backup policy may be different.
Your site's usage should also be taken into account when determining how often you should back up your data:
- For a showcase site that is updated infrequently, one backup per week is sufficient.
- For an e-commerce site, a backup several times a day may be necessary when the commercial stakes are high.
The most important thing is that the backup is automated, checked regularly, stored on a remote server (in another city or country), with several copies available in different locations. Without this, you're jeopardizing the long-term viability of your business. In the event of an incident of any kind, backing up your data will not be enough to cope with the unavailability of your website. It's important to anticipate as far as possible the risks likely to cause a failure. This is where a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) comes in. The BRP is designed to guarantee continuity of service by restarting your IT system as quickly as possible, thanks to a backup site.
At Soledis, we offer backup and disaster recovery solutions based on Veeam technologies. This is an information system protection solution that ensures the orderly restart of applications in the event of failure or disaster, and prevents data loss. Our hosting and backup servers are shared in several European datacenters to spread the risk.
Soledis guarantees a high level of performance: over the past year, we have measured an availability rate of 99.97% for our customers' applications.
The 3 benefits of a DRP
- Your ability to anticipate and deal with potential dangers will enhance your brand image.
You'll be seen as a more solid company, sending a signal of reliability and stability to your employees, customers and financial partners. Your company's reputation will also be enhanced. - Reduce the impact of downtime on your IT operations is not negligible: a loss of sales as well as the loss of your data will be reduced. In fact, around 4 out of 10 companies do not survive a 72-hour shutdown.
- Get your IT back up and running faster and restore your data will help you get through an incident more serenely. As explained above, during the OVH fire, some companies relaunched their website in 1 hour, while others relaunched a month later or simply lost everything.
With IT playing such a major role in today's business world, and the need for greater productivity, a Business Disaster Recovery Plan (BRP) is essential if your online business accounts for a significant proportion of your sales.
Our commitment to our customers also includes a responsive support service covering the entire chain, from application optimization to securing your business in the event of a critical event.
Our Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) guarantees availability even in the event of fluctuating computing power.
Unlike many of our competitors, Soledis does not commit to a response time to your request, but rather to a processing time for your problem. Our approach is based on site availability and rapid incident handling.
Choose the advantages of made-to-measure
Soledis, web agency in Vannes, supports its customers with a hosting and backup solution that's adapted and scalable to their needs. This choice is determined, among other things, by the size of the customer's site, its traffic and orders, and adapts to the evolution of the customer's business.
**According to the Hiscox 2021 report on cyber risk management
https://www.hiscox.fr/courtage/blog/rapport-hiscox-2021-sur-la-gestion-des-cyber-risques
