As memory prices for hard drives, external hard drives and other storage devices plummet it strikes me that it might be time to reconsider the cost of backing up websites and servers online remotely.  There are definitely benefits to having a backup in a distant geographic area in case a major catastrophe knocks out a server, an communication system or even a large area.

That said, many backup decisions are primarily made for local reasons.

What do we do if our local server crashes or gets fried?

For this type of situation having an online backup service can be expensive and can even be bandwidth intensive causing backups to be run at times that might not be conducive to other business functions.

These days terabyte backup drives are often times cheaper than paying for a month or quarters worth of online backup.  Plus they are small and compact, not like the old days of tape drives that could be extremely bulky.

In fact, even if you want to maintain a geographical distance between your stored information and your live system, a low tech way of achieving the same result with backup drives can be easily achieved by using fedex.

The security of sending backup drives with potentially sensitive customer information would definitely be a concern that should be considered, but with bandwidth levels still relatively low in many areas of the United States the cheap pricing of back up drives might make this choice an option worth considering in the right circumstances.

Google has recently upgrade or updated blogger so that uploaded pictures are now hosted for free on Picasa Web Albums.

You see the above message sometimes after you have published something through blogger.  The link will take you to your automatically generated Picasa account.  This is something that is very similar to mixing blogger with Google’s version of Flikr.

Now, I do not currently have a lot of images on my Picasa album as I used to keep my images on one of my own servers.  Essentially hot-linking my images from myself as Bloggers former photo album used to be quirky and crashed quite a bit.  I wanted something more reliable than Blogger’s old system that was pretty much only useful for . . . . well  . . .  it wasn’t useful for much of anything.

This looks eminently more useful and after all, it is free and you can’t knock that!

For people posting images to their own self hosted blog through tools like Windows Live Writer, it could even be useful to publish your images to Picasa instead of your own server to help keep your bandwidth usage down and to also benefit from Google’s indexing process which will undoubtedly look at their own picture server service like a teenager stairs at their own acne in the mirror.

Last night I was forced to take a night off and watch the season finale of Heroes by my nemesis, At&t. 

AT&T is my nemesis because they slammed me into a higher calling plan in 2000 and charged me over $1000 for calls on a regular phone line at a rate of $2.50 per minute.  I vowed never to do business with them again, but recently they purchased Bellsouth where I get DSL and I am still working to unwind that relationship and replace it with Time Warner cable service.

I was busy working on a website last night when the problems started at around 6:30 p.m. Eastern time.  All of a sudden I couldn’t access most of the websites I was visiting, and I can receive e-mail but I couldn’t send e-mail.  Shortly after that, my wife’s computer was not able to access websites either with the exception of Google but not Google News.

I rebooted my modem and wireless router a couple of times, but nothing seemed to work.  I rebooted my computer and my wife’s computer and that didn’t help either.  Since I didn’t have access to the Internet, I couldn’t verify that there was a problem and I didn’t really feel like dealing with AT&T in their customer support because AT&T customer support is an oxymoron.

So I just sat back and watched TV for a couple hours and waited for the DSL to get fixed.

Illustrative of a Need for Redundant Backups

the problem turned out to be an issue with AT&T’s DSL hardware.  My first guess was that my neighbor who was doing some construction on their house had managed to slip into some fiber optic cables or something.  It wasn’t my neighbor.  It was AT&T.  Of course their equipment getting a little old and it’s not up to par and DSL was a stopgap measure to use the telephone equipment that the phone companies already had.  It wasn’t really designed for heavy broadband use, just broadband use.

So AT&T failed because they don’t have a redundant system to back up their equipment when it went down.  As a small business, that illustrated my own need to have a redundant to access the Internet.  Now I have a mobile phone and I can access the Internet through my Treo.  But I think this illustrates my need for a wireless air card or a secondary service for the Internet.  I’m getting close to the point where I might even consider a T1 line and a service plan that guarantees minimal downtime in the event something happens.  That might even be something that I buy myself for Christmas from a company that is. 

Sources and Inspirations -DSL outage hits AT&T in Southeast – CNN.com

Bandwidth is an increasingly more important aspect or requirement for a hosting plan.  More companies more websites are utilizing video and audio and other services that sucked down bandwidth and bandwidth can be expensive if you’re not prepared for it.

Possibly even worse, having your website knocked off the web due to a lack of bandwidth could be something that sends your readers or your viewers or your customers away to a different location.  New paragraph so as you look at the many perks and benefits that come with a hosting plan you should definitely consider the bandwidth question and ask yourself if you plan on using your own videos or other types of services that might require people to download or stream content to their computers from your website.

The teaser rates that many hosting companies provide and the teaser benefits like a registered domain name offered up for free or even a set of personalized pens, which might look cute but at the end of the day they’re just cute and not necessarily practical nor do they necessarily represent what you really need to get the job done and make sure that your website is a success. 

A friend of mine once recommended Yahoo!  As one of the better hosting providers because they have a bandwidth pipe that is so large that they can handle almost anything your website might dish out.  In theory that’s a fairly good suggestion and if you’re looking to ensure that you’ve got enough bandwidth to cover the activity from your website a large large host like Yahoo might be the ticket.  Sometimes they seem to cater to small businesses and small non-technical bloggers, but they do have a very well-developed infrastructure.

I don’t have any experience with their customer support what comes to hosting and if any of the other Yahoo services are good example I would be scared to death of their customer service however if they got the bandwidth and they’ve got the uptime you may not need to call customer service all that much.