How a website crash is making us more prepared

You may have wondered where the last article was. Well, we managed to crash our very own website. It was me who decided to run an update before uploading last week’s article. What a mistake that was! Something went wrong and nothing worked anymore.

I was so devastated! Last week has been super busy, probably like yours, too. Facing a website crash was the least thing I wanted. The error messages didn’t care. They simply smiled at me – from the laptop, the phone and the iPad. It was horrible. Still, all these uncomfortable hours taught me so much.

A huge thanks to our webmaster

Mr. D, our webmaster, was fantastic! The crash happened after normal working hours, increasing the panic for a non-techie like me. I was so overjoyed receiving his first email, calming me down and taking me through the recovery process. The next emails where he updated me on the process reassured me even more: Everything was going to be okay. Mr. D had it under control. Indeed, Mr. D restored the tables and databases, managed to upload the content (he’ll probably laugh as I’m mixing terminology here) and finally, it was all up and running again.

Back up automatically

Now, this is the ironic one. We encourage our clients to regularly back up their files. Our phones do automatic back ups, our emails are automatically backed up. Many cloud providers (we use Dropbox) provide automatic recovery options. Unfortunately, we didn’t have an automatic back up purchased from our web host. Mr. D strongly recommended this and guess what’s being purchased this week!

There’s no need to panic

As much as a nuisance this website crash was, it wasn’t life-threatening. It unfortunately did impact you, our clients and our readers, and, hopefully, it wasn’t too much of an inconvenience. Our business will recover from the hours we were down.

I also learnt there’s not a whole lot that can be done if you don’t know what needs to be done. This was the frustrating bit and leads me directly to the next lesson learnt.

Learn more

These days, there are so many online courses available. There’s not even the need for set hours in a class-room environment. Last year, I’ve used a training course from Udemy to prepare for the Project Management Professional (PMP) exam and loved it. I could run those videos as often as I wanted. Admittingly, there were moments when it’d have been great for some discussion with other students in person rather than over messenger.

So, over the next week or so, I’ll be looking into the various courses I wanted to take and reshuffle them. Clearly, some more IT understanding would do us good. No more excuses!

Don’t procrastinate

You see it. There are a number of areas where we were more easy going about. And yes, we also procrastinate. Playing Mah-jong is our favourite way to relax. Last week’s crash showed that while we’re not going to overcommit (yes, we have that tendency, too), we’re taking a more serious approach to our IT. It will have to occupy a much larger space in our business than we thought probably just two weeks ago.

Over the last few days, we here at Organised Life and Mind have experienced new highs and lows. There are certainly a number of “learning opportunities”. Isn’t that a wonderful way of describing it?

Have you recently experienced something that gave you some new lessons learnt? Do you dare to share yours?

Until next time,
Agni