Here’s what every webmaster has nightmares about. A freak explosion at the server farm that hosts our site, along with an estimated 700,000 others, knocked us off the net for three days and in the process delivered a near-miss dose of reality about the absolute necessity to have a redundancy plan as a backup for the unexpected.

What else? All site addressed email was immediately bounced back to the senders, and because it was the first of the month web crawlers from Google and others hit a brick wall of domain not found – and that translates into loss of ranking. Not critical for us, very critical for others, especially eCommerce sites.

Our web host resells server space from a facility in Texas. Late Saturday afternoon a transformer explosion blew out three walls of the breaker room and fried the wiring to a crisp. Affected were approximately 7,000 primary and secondary hosting accounts, and nearly three quarters of a million sites. (Google “the planet server explosion” for more info.)

What we didn’t know then was what would happen if something we take for granted – the 24/7/365 mostly without a glitch transfer of electrons that make the web a living breathing entity – blew up. A lot.

In this case we were extremely fortunate that the servers themselves escaped physical damage. And that this was the only site we host that was down for days instead of hours. Had this not been the case, recreating the web site wouldn’t be a problem, but the server side blog would have been toast because it’s not backed up.

We’re assured that in the very near future our web host will have a redundant system in place to mirror sites at separate locations. Until then, we’ll keep our fingers crossed; before then all site content will be backed up locally.

The experience also highlighted the absolute necessity for a competent disaster public relations plan. We’ll have more on that later.