It is only after losing valuable data that most of us wake up to the need for preservation of our digital information by regularly backing it up. This World Backup Day, the Founding Director of Website Essentials ^TM tells us why it is important to play it secure   

Many of us have encountered this situation: we have tons of data in our systems and our digital presence makes us happy. We hope that whatever security and backup measures we have taken will hold us in good stead. But what niggles in the back of our minds becomes the monstrous reality one day. All that data is gone, just like that.

Not if you have a foolproof backup system. And internet marketing advisor and the first Yahoo Search Marketing Ambassador in Australia, Mark Tull knows that better than anyone else. Founding Director of Website Essentials TM, a Gold Coast-based company that specializes in website design and conversion, Adwords management and Search Engine Optimization, Mark has been a trailblazer of sorts. A true believer in the power of the net, he was building and designing websites as early as the mid-90s and also understood how crucial it was to have synergy between website designing and marketing.

“Reliability and service key to a good backup solution”

Having dabbled in managing a resort and a few other fields of work, he, along with another person, founded Hot Goanna, a leading Australian Internet Marketing company in 2005 and was highly successful with his venture. Later he sold the company to TPP Internet and went on to work in the area of search engine optimization.

Website Essentials was born in 2009 because Mark felt the need to bring in expertise in the field of internet marketing and wanted to marry it with quality website design and development. He is one of the early Google Adwords Professionals in Australia and Associate Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management. Considering that his company is responsible for data in hundreds of clients’ website, good backup is as essential to him as good hosting and a good operating system.

Excerpts from an interview:  

Q1. Please tell us about your experience of losing valuable data and what steps you took to deal with this persistent problem.

A. Having lost a server at another business years ago, I remember the pain of trying to re-host, re-point and replace multiple websites by ftp from local files.  It was a long weekend I never will forget. With my current business with several hundred client websites, relying only on the server internal backup was a real concern.  Then of course, the epidemic of hacks around the world was only going to get worse and more aggressive, in my opinion.

To deal with this problem, we thoroughly researched many solutions.  Luckily, we pre-empted a massive hack attack on many of our clients’ websites and had blogVault in place.

Q2. What are the important lessons you have learnt through this experience about data recovery and security of your websites?

A.The ability to find the hack / fault and then be able to replace or export an up-to- date complete copy of the site and database is outstanding with blogVault. When you can identify the date of the attack or failure, you can quickly choose the previous day in the backup system and even if you have to reset the host on another server, it is almost instant.  This is real peace of mind.

Q3. What do you look for in a good backup solution?

A.One major quality we look for is customer service and reliability. We need access when we really need it, and we need assistance when we really need it. blogVault can be relied upon for this.

Q4. How have you used blogVault for your security issues?

A.Working with the team at blogVault based on previous hacks, their insight and knowledge has pointed us to continually refine our security and settings, much more so than our hosting provider. This way, we now not only keep an eye on our sites, but we continually work to make them more secure.

Q5. What are the advantages of using WordPress?

A. We love it, search engines love it, and our clients love it. The ability to create your own code and enhance it is excellent. Most SME clients just enjoy being able to really work on their own sites using WordPress.

Q6.What, according to you, are the five essentials for keeping sites and data secure?

A.Good Hosting, Good Operating System, Good email settings, Good Backup service and Good information going out to clients, reminding them that they are part of the solution to being safe on the internet.

Q7. What is the one thing you would like to change about WordPress?

A.I would like WordPress to talk to me and let me know when someone is inside my site, a bit like double verification on your Google account.

If you need to setup an online presence for your business please do contact Mark at http://websiteessentials.com.au/