MBA1590 Q&A Wednesday: My site keeps crashing. How do I find someone to fix it?

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How do I find someone to fix it? Chris's site is going down and he's not really sure what's going on. Is it a hack? Are my servers overloaded? Is it something else? For many of us, our business is our website. It's how we make money. It's the backbone of the business. So downtime is not optional. So in today's episode I'm going to share with you how to find the perfect person to get your site up and running and to prevent this from happening in the future. Many of us need to focus on the business side of things and can't really worry about our website going down. Let's make sure it doesn't. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So Chris's site is going down, he's not sure why and he needs to find somebody to fix it for him. First of all, when your website goes down, it's panic mode. It's code red. Business grinds to a halt, they can't buy a thing. They can't even find out more about your business or your products or services or anything like that. So urgency is high. So I totally get it. And it's almost like we're really in panic mode when this happens. So I'm going to give you some steps here first in the moment and then how to make sure you find somebody to make sure this doesn't happen again. Number one, you should know how your website is being hosted. Whether you're using a service like Squarespace or weebly like a website builder, or you're hosting it with WordPress and your hosting is like WP Engine or Hostgator or something like that, somebody's hosting your website, somebody is putting your site on their servers. They should have a customer support number or chat. I have found that in most cases online chat is the fastest way to get a reply. So this is your first point of contact. Now, obviously, depends on what you have in terms of your package. Some services offer amazing support. They're a little bit more expensive. We use WP Engine for our site at 100 MBA net and we pay a little bit more. But we have incredible service. So if we ever need any help, their technical team is there immediately. Really, it's really instant. So first thing is contact your hosting provider and say, hey, my site is down. Can you tell me what's going on, what's wrong and can you bring me back up? In many cases they can bring you back up and they can identify, hey, this was the problem, there was a hack. Maybe, maybe there was too much load on the plan that you have on the server you're on. They might tell you to upgrade. There are two things you need to get out of this conversation. Number one, you need to get back up asap. Number two, you got to find out why did this happen? Because they necessarily won't be able to help you with that. Because if it is a hack, which is more common than you think, a breach in security, then you're going to need to have a little bit more help from an expert to protect yourself. And their services may not cover that. If your servers are just overloaded, you may just need to upgrade your plan to maybe a dedicated server or something like that to handle the traffic. Maybe you had a spike of traffic. But even if that's the case and you have to upgrade, find out how you can monitor your traffic. Ask them, how can I monitor traffic? Is there any kind of alerts I can get on my email or on my phone and sms? If my site goes down, there should be some sort of measure. That way you can find out before anybody else. You don't want to find out from customers that your site is down, that type of thing. Now if you don't have a service, say for example, you are self hosted somewhere you're using aws, maybe somebody set it up for you and you're not really sure where to go and you want to prevent these things from happening in the future. A lot of people want to go to a freelancer or ask people, hey, do you know like a wizard that can help me out? And that's not really the best course of action. The best course of action is the one that you don't want to hear. It's actually going to take you a little bit longer, but it's going to get you the right person and it's going to be money well spent. Now before you go to upwork or freelancer.com or any of these sites to find somebody to help prevent this from happening in the future, or to help you get back up or to improve your infrastructure on your site, you need to write down what you need really a job description. And it doesn't have to be this like formal job description. It could literally be a couple paragraphs that says this is my situation, this is my problem, this is what I've experienced. This is the technology I'm using. This is the type of site I'm using. Maybe I'm on WordPress. This is a custom written site. The more information that you can provide about the problem you have, the current situation that your site is in, your technology that you're using, any information will be helpful and will attract the right person. A lot of people, they just say, hey, my site is down, I need help. That's not really going to attract the best person for the job. Put some screenshots. What are the errors you see? How often has this happened before? If you contact your host, what do they say? So create a detailed job description and then post the job on the site. Like upwork, for example. Now when you post a job at upwork, it's going to ask you a whole bunch of things, one of which Is the level of expertise you need and the budget. I know you may not want to hear this, but this is the best advice I can give you. And the level should always be expert, because it'll be like, you know, a beginner, novice, expert. Always go for the best person that you can find. And number two, go with the highest budget. Usually they say, do you want somebody like $1 sign, $2, $3 sign, meaning like, most expensive hourly rate, go with the most expensive. I know you may say, you know, money short or something like that, or money's tight, but trust me, you're gonna save money in the long run. If you hire somebody that's $30 an hour, that's not really an expert at this, they may take 10 hours to solve this problem. You're gonna pay $300. While an expert that can fix this in less than an hour, but charges you $100 an hour, you're going to pay a third of the price just for one hour of work. Even if it's a simple problem, they'll be quick and fast and efficient. Getting experts are actually going to save you money in the long run. Save you a headache, save you time. And time is money. When your site is down now, if you're working with this freelancer, they'll give you a time frame. They'll say, hey, I should have you back up and running in X amount of hours, or something like that. You need to communicate to your customers. So whether you have an email list or their phone numbers, just email them and let them know, hey, we know the site is down. Our technicians are working on it right now, and we'll be back up shortly. By communicating to your customers, being proactive, you're gonna, one, look professional, two, you're going to prevent an influx of a barrage of emails, and three, you're gonna prevent customers from being disappointed. Getting in front of it is really important, and communication during this time is really going to help.

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To wrap up today's Q and A. Wednesday's question from Chris My site keeps crashing. How do I find somebody to help? Your job description is your friend. It's going to allow to track the right person. They're going to be able to know hey exactly what they need to do. It's going to save you time, it's going to save you money if you go expert. But of course, don't forget to contact your hosting provider, your website builder, whatever you're using, because it may be an easy fix that they can do immediately. But even if you go down that route, find out why this happened because you may want to hire an expert anyway to optimize things so it doesn't happen again. If you consistently go down, your customers are going to start losing trust with you and you want to make sure that if you ever go down, it doesn't happen again. You prevent it and you do everything you can to stay up. Guys, thank you so much for listening to the 100 MBA show. If you have a question you want to ask on Q and A Wednesday, go ahead and email me over at omar100mba.net and I'll make sure to answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday. Make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don't miss a beat on whatever you use to listen to podcasts. Whatever app you use, whether it's Apple Podcasts or Situ Radio or Himalaya or Spotify, we're on them all. Hit subscribe so that when the next episode's available, it's right on your device. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Many small businesses have a tech person on retainer. They pay them about $500 a month and they maintain their website for them. So ever their website's down, they could just call one person and they'll take care of it. They'll call all the providers, the services and if something is fixing, they'll fix it. Of course you can find these people on Upwork with a great job description, but you may find them through the course of trying to fix a problem. Find out if they have this as an option of course, if your site is not down, you might be saying, well, I'm spending $500 for what? But that's okay. You can maybe come to an agreement and say they can make some improvements optimization, maybe add a page or two when you need it. It's always good to have somebody on call. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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