Most of you may have been wondering what on earth happened to WowJoomla. Well, the site that is on the verge of offering new services underwent the worst case scenario conceivable...

The 3rd party server hosted for us in the US burnt out!

That's right. Can you believe it? This did not just effect the wowjoomla.com server but a network of sites and services offered by the recly.com team (you could call it a sister service), which included clients work. It is a nightmare scenario that no website owner should have to go through. Luckily, we had everything backed up, but still it took us about a month to recover.

Since we are on the topic we need to assess what has gone on here and what it may mean to you as Joomla site owner either starting out with a new site or already have a full fledged blown site that is serving 1000s of pageviews.

1) This is a must that should not need be told. Back up everything, I repeat; "b-a-c-k-u-p e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g", preferably on a daily basis. If you have not backed up your database or your site it is possible that you could lose everything that you have worked for and in some scenarios irretrievable. Look at it from a real-life situation. You walk over to you shop in the middle of the high street to notice that it has been completely burned down, everything disintegrated and you have no insurance.

2) Read the fine prints from your host provider. What is actually covered? What is in that fine print? You expect to get the basics on the deal like 99% uptime, etc. But what happens in a situation when a server or a hard drive burns out or gets destroyed, what provisions they have in place for this situations. Are they covered for 'acts of god'?

3) If you have built the site yourself then have a developer on standby in your rolodex, this means in your contact lists of emails. Seriously, it does you know harm to head over to the Joomla forums or any other developer forums and poke about and make friend with developers, not just for server based issues but in general. You will be surprised by the amount of help you can get out there. However if you suffer an outage then you best option may to get paid assistance, which will determine the fasted response. You have services like joomlancers.com, getafreelancer.com, etc that you can outsource the work. Of course you can contact the wowjoomla.com team if you have any issues or concerns regarding these matters, we are here at your service.

We had to give priority to clients prior to our own site although we may suffer in our reputation but that is the ethos we follow, hence the delay in our site up and running sooner.

But we are back now and intend to fire ahead with the services we want to offer to the community of users that have supported us and strongly grown over the month. Our promise to you is that we will provide many different ways for users to get in contact with us, so we can continue to communicate whatever the situation may arise. Please feel free to tell us about any experience you may have had with a outage or burn out.

Kind regards,
Anton and Azzam