What You Can Learn From the Blogger Outage – Even if You Don’t Use Blogger!

I’m sure by now you’ve heard that Blogger was down for nearly 24 hours Thursday/Friday (although it has now been restored) and many people lost posts and updates to their site from as far back as Wednesday morning.

For those with Blogger blogs, it was a stressful and frustrating time. Would they get their posts back? Would they lose all their hard work? Were they upsetting their readers? their advertisers? Let’s face it, even if you don’t use Blogger, there are times your hosting company can suffer through an outage. Unless you are willing to pay for redundancies and multiple servers – there’s always the chance your website can go down.

Whether or not you have your blog on the Blogger platform, there’s a lot you can learn from this snafu:

Prior to an Outage

• Back Up Your Blog/Website:
  I can’t say this enough (even though I so rarely follow it … let’s face it, I don’t even back up my hard drive). Whether or not its part of your hosting plan, you should back it up on a regular basis. Especially if you’re going to do a site redesign or upgrade your blogging platform.

• Keep An Offline Copy Of Your Posts:
  Consider keeping an offline copy of your posts, in case something happens to your hosting and they have to go to an earlier version of your blog. While it may be a lot of work to have to cut and paste, you can always use an offline blog editor – which keeps a back-up AND lets you push posts to your blog.

During an Outage

• Keep Your Audience Updated:
  Let your readers know via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc that your site is down and you’re doing everything in your power to get it up. Thank them for their patience, and keep the updated at regular intervals – especially when the site is back up!

• Use Social Media to Implement Anything on Deadline:
  If you had sponsorship/advertiser deadlines, a contest to run, or something else that needs to happen while your site is down, consider taking it to social media. You can get your followers active and still participating with your site, even while it’s down.

After an Outage

• Check Your Blog:
  Make sure everything is intact. Is the layout the same? Are your posts current? Did your scheduled posts go live? Fix anything that’s broken.

• Inform Your Audience:
  Let your readers know that you’re back in business. You don’t necessarily have to post about it on your blog, but you can do that too.

• Keep Up Your Regular Schedule:
  Get immediately back into your consistent blogging schedule … and make sure to back up your site!