It’s every webmaster’s nightmare when the server reaches a point it needs updates and good practice is to make sure backups of the website are all up to date.
During these updates, our server disc failed and this meant we had to have the server rebuilt before recovering the files to get the website back in place. All sound easy right? Well, what happens when your hosting company that offers a 3rd party server backup service can’t recover the files?
Yes, you guessed that means you lose your website/s and all the work that went into it over the years. But here is the kicker, the said server company then say’s it’s not responsible!
They were as helpful as a chocolate teapot and failed to explore alternative options of data transfer, I’d call this willful damage to a customer’s business but alas they just churn out their terms and conditions to avoid the question of responsibility.
So that’s why the recent downtime happened and why for a number of days and why there will be products without any images.
Being experienced in these things, we have a third backup but the problem with this is that it relies on the manual submission of the product images which when you consider is in the 30+ thousand images for live products, it’s a time-consuming job. Well, more specifically, running this website over the last 8 years has created 1TB of data and something very few webmasters consider when they start an eCommerce website.
The uploading of images needed to be done programmatically over a day or so but given our hosting company (The largest in the UK) is manned by the generation of “it’s someone else’s fault” we had to find another solution.
The World Wide Web does open doors and facilitates people to sit in the comfort of their home to find things much easier than by the old methods of doing the leg work but this doesn’t come with its problems for those providing this service. On our website, there are many vintage tools that are shown in greater detail than the average eye can usually detect, it also comes with experience, product knowledge, and standards. This also comes with its responsibilities regarding data protection and security along with providing a good experience for customers.
We apologise for any inconvenience during this time but be rest assured the stress and hard work to get things back in order again will be worthwhile. It gave us time to think about what we do here and how we had invested in other areas such as the tool auction website we were building, this will now be retired for the foreseeable future so we can again focus on Tooltique.
Our sons have also gone onto pastures new so there have been more changes than what can be seen via the website. I’ve considered my position and feel that by concentrating on ourselves and not what others want or the distractions they cause, this business can flourish at what we do best.
