I’ve been sitting here for the past couple of hours watching all of the comments from people that have their web site hosted at BlueHost. BlueHost has two data centers, and at one of them there was a power transformer failure (perhaps fire). Their local electric utility asked them to shut down the data center (except phones) because of the extra load on the power system, so BlueHost did a orderly shutdown of their server farm.

What they didn’t do was take advantage of social networking to alert their customers. Of course, their phone lines were overloaded, so lots of frustration out there.

A lot of people were complaining about lost revenue for their sites. And I am thinking: what was their plan for a service interruption of their web site? Do they have a backup data center? Is their data even backed up? Or are they just relying on their hosting company to take care of everything?

Admittedly, there are things that a data center can do. There can be properly configured backup data generators (with a transfer switch to isolate them from the local power grid). There can be a disaster plan whereby there is better communication to their customers (such a Twitter / Facebook / web page status hosted elsewhere). The BlueHost folks didn’t do well in the communication department; it took until about 2 hours into the outage for them to start Tweeting.

But, all of the whining people out there saying that the outage is costing them money … what is your responsibility to keeping *your* site up for your customers? What data backup plans do you have in place? How are you communicating with *your* customers about problems with *your* site? Do you have a plan? Have you practiced your plan?

We’ve talked about data backups here before. We’ve mentioned that we use Carbonite to back up the data on our home computers. I manage several sites, and I have database backups emailed to me daily (and I have used those backups to recover from damage database tables). My backup plan — my Disaster Recovery Plan — is not perfect; it could use some tweaking.

But — what is your plan?  Comments are invited.