We’re not engineers

Today’s entry is of extreme importance. It is about data safety.

A lot of people call us up and ask about the cost of making a website. We almost always start out by saying that they will need two things before talking to us: hosting and a domain. They’re usually surprised about the hosting part. For some reason they seem to assume that we can actually host their website.

Why don’t we offer a hosting service? Because we’re not engineers or system administrators. We design websites and develop web applications. That is our area of expertise. We do not have the preparation or the experience to take responsibility for fixing stuff on a Linux server when things break. Because of this, we cannot assure the safety and continuity of our client’s data in a server.

This is a room full of people at most web design studios that are ready to help you should something serious happen to your server

What we can do at Ahlera is build robust applications and websites that interact with stuff installed in the server to obtain results, as long as the server itself is up and running. That bold part is the hard part to guarantee by a design studio.

I can think of two cases right now that will serve as good examples of this. Six years ago I lost a server with several personal projects because it simply caught fire. I was hosting with a top company and the datacenter had all sorts of fire, intrusion, and flood security, but it happened.

What major Internet-related event took place in May 2006? If you’re addicted to tech news like us, you’d know that this was the month were The Pirate Bay’s servers were raided by Swedish police. They pretty much came in and seized servers, routers, cables, harddrives, and other important stuff. The problem is that those servers didn’t only contain data from The Pirate Bay; they also contained data for dozens of other clients of the same hosting company that had unquestionably legal content on it. People that had nothing to do with The Pirate Bay (other than hosting with a company that has strong ties to it) saw their sites offline for a couple of days. For someone who does business primarily on the Internet, “a couple of days” can be a lot more costly than you think.

There’s a variety of possible scenarios of things that can go wrong at hosting companies. I just thought of two extreme cases, but think of the hundreds of simpler ones that I didn’t mention that could happen any given day.

Right now we’re developing and app for a client that needs two servers with two different configurations. We planned the server specs based on our little app and helped in the hosting company selection process, but our client knows that our responsibility only goes as far our application. We guarantee our application and will fix any bug in it, but if those servers break, catch fire, or simply disappear, he has to call the hosting company. Of course that we’ll help him out with what we can, as we’ve done many times, but he knows that we are not responsible for it.

If you have a design studio that offers hosting and don’t have a system admin on payroll, you should ask yourself the following questions:

Does my client know and understand my responsibility limits?
Do I have a signed document from my client stating that he knows my limits?
Do I make remote nightly backups of every email, database, log, and other file that belongs to my client should RAID1 fail?
Am I in a position to withstand going to court if a client loses all the data he’s hosting with me?

If you’re a client that hosts with the same people that made your website maybe you should call them up and ask them the following:

Do you have backups of all my data, including emails, databases, logs, and other files on a server other than my own? There’s no point in keeping a backup in the same computer for obvious reasons.
How often do you make these backups?
If something bad were to happen right now and all data on the live server was lost, how long would it take to have me back up and running?

Web design and hosting are two completely different things. They are almost as different as apples and oranges.

We hope that this helps both clients and studios realize the importance of data and why it is best to let real engineers handle it.

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