Freelance Writers — Make Your Living Completely (or Almost Completely) Online? Here’s What to Do When Your Website Goes Down

February 18, 2009

Original Title:  What to Do When Your Website Goes Down: Advice for Those Who Make Money Online

Nothing . . . that’s exactly what you can do, in spite of what you want to do. Two of my sites are dead right now, and I’ve lost at least a couple of hundred bucks because of it. So, it made me write this post just to remind those of you who make money online of a few things. Namely:

How to Protect Yourself When You Make a Living Completely Online

1. Sign up with a good host and domain name provider: Even though the problem with my sites is not my host company (I host with Hypermart and NetworkSolutions), it’s with my domain name provider, NameCheap.com. I use NameCheap to register all of my domain names and have never had a major problem with them, so I’m not holding this against them too much.

What exactly is my problem? I use NameCheap’s free domain forwarding feature. Apparently there’s a glitch in it, which means when you type in my site name, eg, Work-from-Home-Writing-Jobs.com (the site name under which I sell my ebook on SEO writing via ClickBank.com), it goes to an under construction page. Arrrggghhhhh!

**Publisher Note: You can now get JUST the marketing portion of the SEO writing ebook (How to Market for SEO Writing Work). Details.**

2. Check your sites daily: I didn’t even realize until early afternoon that my sites were down. I was doing some article marketing and was testing the link in one of the articles; that’s when I discovered the site was dead. Something told me to try my other sites and sure enough, they were down too. I called my sister, who has sites with NameCheap as well and sure enough, hers were inaccessible also.

After a few frantic emails and live support help, that’s when I discovered that there was a system-wide problem with NameCheap, which they’re working on and can take up to 24 hours to fix. This is costing me big time!

3. Pay attention to sales dips: I should have been clued in earlier, as my sales were a little off. But being so busy, I didn’t give it a second thought. If I’d paid attention to this and done #2 earlier, I would have known earlier. Now in this case, it wouldn’t have made a difference. But in cases where it’s a quick fix, it could have saved me several hours of downtime.

4. Relax, relate, release: After freaking out for about half an hour, I realized that I’d done all I could do and that I just had to chill. After all, it’s just money. I still have my health and it will be fixed. While I hate the thought of missing a day or two of sales, stressing over it won’t make it better any sooner, so I’m just moving on with my work day (I’ll have a big drink later!).

Conclusion: If you make your living completely online, then you’re at the mercy of technology. That’s just the way it is. Do everything in your power to mitigate problems. And when it’s out of your hands, try not to let it stress you. Eventually it does get fixed. And if not, you can always move to another provider.

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Why I Turned Down a $2,000 – $3,000 Freelance Writing Job That Could Have Led to Even More Work; and

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Copyright ©  Originally published in 2009; Republished in 2010. All material on this site is copyright protected and cannot be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without my written consent (linking to is fine).


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