Aaron Weiss

Website Administration

Learn about my approach to website administration and optimization. Articles will include projects and experiments about maintaining a website.

You Need a Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan

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You’ll never realize that a backup and and disaster recovery plan will help you sleep better at night if you run a website, even if you never have to recover your website.

Recently, two hosting platforms and their users suffered missteps.

a2 Hosting, a shared hosting provider I’ve been using since 2013, has had their Windows servers shut down for over a week as the company suffers from a ransomware attack. Additionally, the available backups the company has for customers appear to be over 2 months old.

DigitalOcean mistook a user’s script as a crypto-mining operation, and shut down a startup’s servers.

I’m fortunate to not be affected as my a2 Hosting account is Linux-based, and my DigitalOcean VPS is a low-profile risk. However, this is devastating for these company and their users. I’m sure there are terms of service policies that cover these hosting companies for situations like these to a certain aspect.

There’s a much to learn from these situations, and this is a good time to reflect on having plans for your website in situations like these.

Restorable backup plan

There’s no excuse not to have a backup plan and infrastructure for your computer, websites, and any important data. Here are some of the backups I have set in my digital life:

  • For my main computer, I have a full weekly backup with daily incremental backups, that are then synced to my FreeNAS box, which are also synced to a Backblaze B2 Bucket.
  • For my FreeNAS server, I have a backup of the config file that is backed up to Dropbox, Backblaze, and mirrored on a second USB drive.
  • For my websites, my entire cPanel host instance is backed up each week, and then downloaded to my FreeNAS server. The individual websites have backups with BackupBuddy which have weekly and daily schedules relative to their respective performance, which are then synced with Dropbox. Some sites also backup to Amazon S3.

As you can see, take my data very seriously. Some data has 3 or 4 destinations. I’m ready to launch a new computer image, FreeNAS box, or return my entire cPanel instance or individual website back from the dead.

In fact, I recently had a botched release of improvements to this very website that went poorly. I was able to bring the site back up in less than 30 minutes because I have the infrastructure and documentation in place to recover.

Disaster Recovery Plan and Exercises

Just having a back up isn’t enough. Knowing how to recover those backups is an important aspect too.

In the case of a2 Hosting, had someone had recent backups of their website, they could have found a new service, restored their backups, and changed their DNS to the new service. After DNS propagation, a website could return to full operations within 24 hours at the latest.

At my day job, I’ve participated in Disaster Recovery Exercises where I help validate whether or not applications I use can perform critical tasks after the recovery begins. It’s a boring exercise, but I now see how important it really is.

My recommendation is to have a test environment that is nearly identical to your site’s live environment, do something to make it no longer work, and then restore the site from a backup. You might even want to try and see if you can also find a new vendor and restore your site to that vendor. Having that knowledge will help you sleep better at night.

Planning for the Future

Despite this situation, I’m still sticking with a2 Hosting and DigitalOcean for the immediate future. a2 Hosting has been a great partner, and I have only a few support tickets with them since I started. I know if I was on the other side of the table, I’d be furious. Companies make mistakes, and no company is infallible.

The moral of this story is: a company as large as these two companies are, they should have had their customer’s data backed up to a separate location (although customers should be responsible for their own data) and had a plan in place to return their service to functionality at a quicker pace.

You don’t have to be a2 Hosting or DigitalOcean, or their users. You now have the knowledge to be better.

No Blog Comments

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You may have noticed that I do not allow blog comments on my website, and that is explained very briefly in each blog posts’ disclosure. I made that decision early on when I decided to launch this website.

From an SEO and community-building perspective, this is an awful choice. From a lifestyle perspective, it’s freeing!

Blog Comments in Context

Blog commenting was the driver of Web 2.0. Directly interacting with the author and their content alongside others was a thrilling feature. When I was first learning about modern website development and marketing, comments and social media were major initiatives for developing an active community and building authority.

That was the 2000s.

Now, in the late 2010s, I hear from so many people, “this article is great, just ignore the comments.”

Case against blog comments

SPAM

I’ve seen so many websites find abusive ways to insert links to their websites. It’s an epidemic. The plethora of plugins and options to stop it help, but not enough. When I’ve done link building research or helping a website recover from a penalty, I’ve seen so many valueless comments robotically inserted to websites with outdated software. Where’s the value in that? There isn’t.

Moderation

Outside of SPAM, legitimate comments may not be as helpful as they appear. Trolling and negativity are rampant, and users can have very strong opinions that detract from the article’s points. These situations lead the discussion to a toxic territory as commentators generally choose anonymity and don’t have much accountability.

Negative lifestyle

The dopamine rush of getting a legitimate, helpful comment may actually be a detriment. Instead of writing articles that are helpful and provide value, the thrill of getting comments in general can lead to creating content that is encourage to entice readers to comment. Without commenting, focus on creating meaningful creations and equity in your website may be easier without the constant pressure to deliver provocative content.

Case for blog comments

Neil Patel makes some excellent points why blog comments should be used and are beneficial:

Social proof

When a blog post has dozens or more insightful comments, that may be a sign of authority and trust.

Network and share

Sometimes the comments can be the real value in the the blog post. One thoughtful comment can lead to opportunities to follow and be followed. The internet and web was designed to help share information and develop ideas.

Creates a living document

When I was developing this website, I was looking for all sorts of snippets and how-tos. When I found them, the comments included appreciative comments or suggestions for further improvement from that author’s contributions. Comments do have the potential to make the world a better place.

Accountability

Having readers call you on your bullshit is important. No one enjoys having their flaws revealed and laid bare. However, the sign of a true leader and someone willing to grow is able to accept criticism and learn from it.

The Decision Has Been Made

For the time being.

While researching this article, I found many authors who do and don’t allow comments. I also found websites where comments were disabled, and then re-enabled after some time. Reasons for turning them off weren’t due to the aforementioned reasons, but do to their expectations around conversations happening elsewhere and predictions about the future of online discussion. Whether their predictions were true or not, re-enabling comments were due to the landscape changing to where they were valuable to the website again.

In conclusion, at this point in my personal website’s nascent existence and my current lifestyle choices, blog comments are not valuable to me at this moment. I cannot justify to myself the time it would take to think about and manage comments. However, I am open to enabling them in the future.

But that’s just me. You should know your audience and your goals. Comments can provide value, but you should decide if your platform is the right place to build such a community.

If you have a comment for me, feel free to contact me directly.

Incrementalism in Website Development: Why Websites Are Never “Done.”

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My girlfriend has been exercising with the help of Julian Michaels the last several months, and her results have been awesome. As I am practicing my own Guitar Aerobics, with vast improvement, I’ve over-heard Julian yell to my girlfriend several times as she re-watches a certain video, “Perfect is boring. Perfect sucks”.

She’s right.

Many yearn for it. Our education system brainwashes us with it. Our employers and clients expect it. The truth is, “perfect” is a subjective and terrible goal.

I’ve seen hundreds of websites launch. Some taking as long as three years or more to successfully launch. From the moment the contract’s ink dries to publication in an industry as fickle and constantly evolving as website development, crafting the “perfect website” is rarely worth the time, expense, emotion, and distracts from the primary objective.

Instead, start small, focus on what is truly essential, and improve on what you have incrementally. A valuable website is always evolving, and therefore, is never “done.” 

Starting Small

When building any website or application, start small. If your website will be brand new, you don’t need dozens of pages. Nope. Here are the basics of what you need:

  • Who
  • What
  • When
  • Where
  • Why

All of those can be answered in just a few pages:

  • Descriptive but short homepage
  • About page
  • Contact page
  • Privacy policy, disclosures, and other regulatory requirements

That is all you need to start your website. Have it proof-read, launch it, and print the business cards. Starting small also might relieve some pressure of launching a site and getting back to business. It can also help get some basic aspects of SEO started too.

I didn’t follow my own advice

Despite seeing so many websites struggle to go live over the years, I had to look in the mirror. I also took too long trying to launch my own website and re-start my own personal brand.

Predominately, I spent WAY too long trying to get the search feature that I wanted. Too many long days finding a method, getting it to work, kinda, or at least in a fashion that wasn’t satisfactory to me.

Because I failed so many times, it discouraged me from moving along in developing my website, and growing my personal brand.

When I did follow my own advice

Finally, I had realized I didn’t need certain features on my website’s initial release.

The first one was an expandable search bar in the navigation mentioned above. Why? I went back to following my own advice: Start small and improve incrementally. Why did I want it initially? Search features are important to growing websites, and an expandable search bar looks cool. Something looking cool and being a functional attribute are two different things.

Next, my website was small. Just a few pages. If I launch my website with just a home page, about page, and contact page, why would I need search functionality? Therefore, the search bar was removed from my initial release.

I also didn’t include a blog. Why? I didn’t have any posts written yet. I didn’t need a section on my homepage. I spent too long creating a section of my homepage that would display my most recent blog posts. It looked pretty cool. The problem, I didn’t have anything worthy of publication, yet.

So got back to the basics: who am I, what I do, where and how to contact me, and when to expect a response. Therefore, I unpublished my blog page and removed that section from my website.

The website was finally launched successfully. I’m quite proud of it, especially because it’s light-weight, fast, simple to the point, and portrays the values that I wish to project about my talents and experience. It’s not flashy — it’s functional. It leverages some features I’ve never truly had a chance to use in the past, as well as deploy processes and concepts that I’ve learned at my day job.

Incrementalism

Some product development companies have been using SCRUM and similar processes to build and improve products and applications for the last few decades. Instead of building one “perfect” product release, a minimal viable product would be produced. Little-by-little that product would be continuously improved. Teams would collect bugs and new features, decide on which ones to develop, test those changes, and then deploy the a new release before starting the next so-called “sprint.” I admit that’s a very lay-persons version of the process, but simple enough for this example.

Now that my own website is launched, I’ll be writing more blog posts and deploying that super-cool super-functional blog post section on the homepage. I’ll even be following my own content schedule to ensure I’ll have reasonable amount of content published in a reasonable amount of time. Most of all, I’ll have a website that promotes me and expresses my talents. I’ll also be adding some improvements overtime. But just a few improvements overtime, tested rigorously in an development environment.

One of those improvements of late is a working expandable search bar in the navigation, finally:

Animation of this website's expandable search bar in the navigation

It truly is the little things.

 

Photo credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Simple-kanban-board-.jpg