The weight of acquiring ChurchMag a few weeks ago came crashing down on me this past weekend.
First, the server crashed. ChurchMag was getting so much love, all the other websites on the shared hosting became insanely jealous, so we were given the boot.
I can’t tell you the amount of panic that raced through my chest as the “whitescreen of death” loaded up as I visited ChurchMag.
Here are some of the lessons I learned from my experience:
1. Own It
The first thing I wanted to do was blame. Blame the information I received. Blame the hosting service. Blame the systems in place. Blame, blame, blame …
The first way to successfully make it through any tech crisis, is own it. I should have dug-up more information. I should have been monitoring my server. I should have contacted my hosting company.
When you start owning the problem, you can release your frustration and anger and start dealing with the real problem at hand!
2. Don’t React
When you face a tech crisis, it’s easy to start reacting instead of acting. My hosting provider suggested they return ChurchMag online and quickly migrate ChurchMag to a beefier server. Easy enough, right? Wrong. Saturday morning I woke up to find that the migration had failed and only part of ChurchMag had landed on the new sever. The result? No ChurchMag.
I ended up wasting at least an hour of my Saturday morning looking at other hosting services. Not only was I wasting time, but I wasn’t actually accomplishing anything towards fixing the problem. I was just spinning my wheels. Moreover, my hosting service had bumped me to high priority and was re-migrating ChurchMag as fast as they could.
No hosting service is perfect and they worked fast to get things resolved. This was not a reason or time to be leaving my web host provider!
3. Work
After my wife slapped me around a little, I got busy working on all of those things I never have time to do (Let’s just say my Dropbox folder is finally organized!).
This is the best way to deal with overreacting:
Start working.
If it’s working towards fixing the problem? Great. If you have to wait for a phone call, wait for a website to be migrated or wait for an email reply, consider working on something else. Organize some files, tidy up your email inbox, clean your desk, do something. If having a tech crisis isn’t bad enough, there’s no need to add to the problem by wasting time pacing around and getting nothing done.
Have you recently faced a ‘tech crisis’?
How did you deal with it?
Mark Robinson says
Such great advice and you handled it so well Eric!
No point in getting massively stressed out in these situations.
If you have a Facebook page or twitter account it’s easy to keep clients/users up to date while waiting for the your site to come back.
Eric Dye says
Thank you, Mark. 🙂
And you’re right. That’s excellent advice when dealing with a server outage, etc …
Peter says
Wow Eric, what a crisis! I’m glad that you survived it 🙂 May I please ask you which hosting provider you were with and which one you migrated to?
Eric Dye says
It was an internal migration, so it was the same provider. I hope to write a review on my new host, soon. I just want to make sure we’re sailing smooth, first. 😉