I have been in the IT industry for a few decades and thought that I would share some tips on how to administer a Production website properly. Hopefully some of you will find this useful:
Many Symbiostock artists have never had a website before and therefore don't understand any of the standards associated with the IT industry.
Your Symbiostock site is an e-commerce site. It's sole purpose (for the majority of artists), is to sell your artwork.
Your Symbiostock site should also be what is referred to as a "Production" website. You should never be developing or testing on your Production website. You should setup another website for development and testing.
Your Symbiostock website should be up and running 99.999% of the time. This is commonly referred to as the "five nines":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_ninesFYI: If you are up for 99.999% of the time, then you will only be down for a little over 5 minutes per year!
If your website is down when a customer comes to it for the first time, they might never return again. If a customer is returning to your website while it is down, they might never come back again. Either way, that could end up in lost sales. This is not something that you want to happen.
Here are some "tips":
Backups: - Backup your website often. If your website crashes, you can't recover unless you have a backup. How often you backup your website is a decision that you need to make, but once a day is a good starting point.
- Backup your website during "off-hours". "Off-hours" is a term used to denote a time when there is very little traffic on your website. You don't want to be running a backup while customers are using it, because it might slow down your website (since it is using resources to do the backups) and the customer might get annoyed and leave. You also want to do a backup when traffic is slowest so that the data in your backups will be "consistent" (see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_consistency). Evenings and weekends are usually the slowest time for most websites, but you need to figure out what is the slowest time for your website and then schedule backups during that timeframe. Remember that a website can be accessed from all around the world, not just the country where you reside.
- Backup your website before you make ANY changes. The last thing you want is to make a change and then receive the "white screen of death". If your website goes down and it takes you hours (or days) to bring it back up, that will most likely lead to lost sales and annoyed customers.
- Keep as many backups as you can for as long as you can. You never know when you will need to recover from a backup that was from a week or two ago. Sometimes updates look like they go well at first, but then you find a serious issue a week or more later. Remember, you can't recover if you don't have the appropriate backup.
Maintenance (also commonly referred to as "Change Control") - Maintenance includes any sort of change to your website, including adding, modifying, and deleting plugins, widgets, themes, etc.
- All maintenance should be fully tested on a non-Production website. You don't want to use your Production website for testing purposes.
- Maintenance should only be delivered during off-hours. Once again, you don't want to make a change to your website and then have it go down for hours during your time of highest traffic.
- All maintenance deliveries should have a "rollback plan". A "rollback plan" is a way to reverse the changes that you made, just in case things don't go as planned.
- Try to withhold doing updates right after they come out. This is called being on the "bleeding edge" (and there is a reason for the terminology). Wait at least a few days or even a week or two before applying an update. This will give the developers a chance to find any bugs that they couldn't find in their testing phase.
Please note that this isn't an all-inclusive list, but rather just a starting point.
Hopefully others that have been in the industry will chime in and add some "tips" as well.
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