You never know what is going to happen to your site. Servers are temperamental beasts. Here one minute, gone the next in the blink of an eye.

Might be a power outage, virus, an overly enthusiastic developer. There are loads of reasons why your site might suddenly vanish.

You need to make sure you always have a holding page ready for such eventualities. Make sure this page is on a different server because if your server goes down it’ll take the holding page down too.

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The cardinal rule of the web. Never forget to renew your domain - even if you don’t need it anymore.

Obvious right? Of course it is! But accidents to do happen. Things do get forgotten, especially in big corporations or with small companies around the time the company card is about to be renewed.

Trust me, I know. I have experienced the fall out when domains are not renewed. It’s ugly, and expensive to rectify.

The first example came when I was working for a music brand (who’s name will remain anonymous but they were small and funky) and it was domain renewal time. I reminded the MD who said his IT manager would take care of it. The renewal date came and went and suddenly their site vanished and email stopped working. Then they noticed that where their site had been was a white page with garish flashing text and a text in (h1) format saying, “Domain for sale - sensible offers only.” £5,000 later got them their domain and email back. The IT manager thought the MD was going to renew as the payment details on the card were in the MD’s name. Lesson one: clearly identify responsibility and install a back up plan incase of illness or error.

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