There are many scenarios that could lead to a lost website.  Some of the most common include activities of hackers, incompatibility with new or updated software and hardware failure on the server side.  Some inexperienced website owners have made the mistake of deleting their site while in the cPanel too.

When this happens, the common solution is to run to the backup and restore everything from posts to comments, products to graphics. In situations where web owners didn’t show enough forward thinking and fail to back up their websites, they end up losing their website for good. They must then start from scratch. Unfortunately, when you lose your website, you lose a lot more than just pages and blog posts. 

Loss of marketing leverage

Most websites heavily rely on a list of email subscribers. The list offers a free way to bring repeat visitors to any promotion. It also allows targeted advertising on e-commerce. Losing your website may also lead to the loss of your subscriber list if it is saved in a hosted database rather than a third party service.  Rebuilding it could take a long time and you may have to resort to using expensive marketing methods like PPC advertising.

Lost revenue

“When you don’t backup your website, you will be offline for a while as you try to remedy the situation” says New Zealand Hosting Giant Umbrellar.co.nz. “Through that period you will lose potential business and reputation recovery is often difficult, especially if your website is your only storefront”.

Running to an insurance company under such a situation may not be a solution either as some of them will not pay out if they determine that you haven’t done enough to protect your website.

Incurring Google Penalties

After a site goes down for a while Google bots crawling it will be served 404 errors. Repeated occurrences of this will see Google prevent the site from showing up in search results. You would need to apply to Google if you want the penalty removed. You will lose a lot of the search engine trust you have built up if your site keeps going down.

Loss of search engine rankings

The bulk of the traffic for most websites offering quality information to readers on their blog is organic. In some cases, the websites contain hundreds of posts pulling in traffic from the search engines. Losing the website means losing all of the organic traffic and domain rank. Starting from scratch is not a guaranteed way to generate the same amount of organic traffic as you had before losing your website.

Loss of loyal customers

For an e-commerce website there is the danger of losing your website just after some customers have placed orders.  Without backup, it will be very difficult to retrieve contact details of the individuals to fulfil their orders later or issue a refund. This will severely damage your reputation, and, in some cases, your online payment gateway company may cut its ties with you.

These are some of the things you are faced with when you lose a website. To avoid this, you need to ensure you web host offers accessible recent backups of your site; backups that can be deployed in an instant. When this is not possible, you should consider other independent website back up options.