All,

Thought this would be a good time to start a thread with lessons learned from the AvailHosting failure.

Looking through the "Avail is out of Business Thread" that Jeremy (The owner of Avail whom everyone is so "sorry" for) started earlier today; I see numerous errors that the site admins hosted by Avail made in protecting their site, data etc.

Any tips from experienced admins on how to prepare for contingencies will be greatly appreciated

Post useful tips such as backup your own data, trademark logos or ideals, encrypt database etc.

Finally, please post tips on how to weed through all the ads
from the companies that post here and find good hosting firms. I used a couple of reccomendations I saw from others here that Avail was okay to make my decision to go with them a ouple of weeks ago. I see now that posts here on WHT are not the only tool one should use to make a decision.

capetown-
While it is truly tragic to see this kind of catastrophie happen, I think that everyone will have learned a valueable lesson when all is said and done. You should never rely on anyone other than yourself to backup your site(s). This is what I would do, I would always retain a backup of my site on my local computer, so in the event that anything like this ever happens, it can easily be fixed. With any mysql databases that my sites has I back those up everynight via a cron job that I have setup in my control panel. If you cannot setup a cronjob in your control panel, the if your host allows ssh, then you can ssh into your account and use a mysqldump command. There are many ways to go about handling this, but the point is for clients to always retain backups of their sites.

-Steven