By Carole Hayward
I sit here this morning grateful for the opportunity to blog because yesterday it wasn’t possible to do at all. Bluehost is my company’s host for its website, blog, and e-mail. Yesterday, Bluehost had a bad day.
I started my day in the usual way, checking e-mail, returning clients’ messages, moving projects forward. Then at 9:04 a.m., I couldn’t access my e-mail. But of course, that didn’t stop me from trying. So for several minutes, I think it’s me, that I did something wrong. Wrong login, password, something. Then I finally realize it’s not me, it’s something else. Something big.
I soon learned that because Bluehost was having a bad day, I was going to as well. I realized that I couldn’t e-mail my host’s support desk, so I tried to find out some news on my own. Twitter was very helpful in this situation. I was able to follow Bluehost to read real-time updates. (I noticed that Bluehost picked up THOUSANDS of new followers—me included—on Twitter during this crisis. Although it appears to have been an effective way to increase its following, I don’t recommend a system-wide crisis as a way to engage your community.)
While it was somewhat reassuring to learn that it wasn’t just me, the enormity of the situation hit me. Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of websites were down. Small businesses of all kinds were unable to conduct business per their normal routine. This went on for most of the day. This is how many people conduct their business, express their thoughts, and generally communicate nowadays, and in an instant, it was unavailable.
The situation has been resolved (Thank you, Bluehost!), but I realized several things yesterday that I’m still pondering today. Here they are in no particular order:
- My company and I are vulnerable to this happening again, and there doesn’t seem to be any action I can take to prevent it. One of my business goals is to respond immediately to my clients, and I couldn’t do that yesterday. The fact that an outside force could affect my business practices to such a degree is very unsettling, and I feel relatively powerless to change that. Vulnerability is a fact of the technological times we live in.
- In a crisis like this, I was truly flying blind. I had no idea who was trying to reach me, and since I normally get hundreds of e-mails a day, and suddenly I was getting none, I experienced I-don’t-know-what-I-don’t-know syndrome, which is not a fun game to play. I reached out to clients and provided them with an alternate e-mail to reach me for the duration of the crisis. Although I can almost always come up with a workaround solution to a problem, this didn’t seem professional to me, and I didn’t like it. “Hi, my website, blog, and e-mail are down. If you need to reach me, please contact me at this alternate e-mail address.” Ugh! I could just imagine my clients wondering what kind of rinky-dink outfit I was running here.
- I had to talk on the phone! I realized yesterday how little I actually do that anymore, but without other means at my disposal, talking directly with my clients was an effective means of communicating, but I felt like my clients and I were both out of practice doing this. From someone who, as a teenager, spent hours at a stretch chatting on the phone, this seems weird to me. Weirder still, we all have powerful phones in our hands at all times these days, and we don’t talk on them much.
- I was very grateful that this happened on a Friday in the summertime. If it had happened even two days earlier when I was extremely busy, my stress levels would have been significantly higher. But what if it happens again, say on a Wednesday, when I have several critical deadlines to meet?
- I appreciated the fact that my website doesn’t involve e-commerce. I have great sympathy for other business owners sitting there, flying blind, knowing that they were losing sales and revenue as the minutes ticked by into hours yesterday.
- On vacation recently, we got into a spirited discussion about whether we could ever enter into another Dark Ages where knowledge becomes lost. I came down on the side of yes, I think it’s possible. Yesterday reinforced that to me. We’ve become, in a relatively brief time, so accustomed to accessing information via our technology. What if it weren’t available anymore? Knowledge could become lost to us. The movie Book of Eli popped into my head on more than one occasion yesterday. As information becomes less and less available in print and exists more and more in the virtual realm, we rely heavily on access. It’s scary to think about what could happen if access were unavailable for a prolonged period of time.
I learned a great deal during yesterday’s forced downtime. I’d love to hear how others coped during Bluehost’s crisis and if you have any suggestions for protecting ourselves in the future.
