How To Survive When Your Blog Site Goes Down

TypePad went down due to a DOoS attack the end of last week through the first part of this week. And they're still having problems on and off. A lot of blogs hosted on the site, including this one, were non-existent or spotty at best. Reading through the twitter feed for #typepadstatus, there were a lot people and businesses out there who depended on their blogs for business. Many didn't know what to do and emotions ranged from panicked to pissed.

This isn't just a TypePad problem. You could lose your blog for a number of reasons. t doesn't take a large blogging platform like TypePad going down to put your blog out of commission. It could be an attack on your own blog site or your own web server could go down taking your site and blog with it.

There are ways you can survive your blog going down and still connect with your audiences in a timely matter. Thinking about it ahead of time and having a plan is a good start. Here are some options to consider.

Re-direct your URL. If you won your own URL, but are hosting on another platform (like TypePad), you can temporarily redirect your URL to a backup page, directing people searching for your blog to your other sites or platforms.

Use social blogging sites temporarily. If you have a Tumblr account, you can put your blog posts up there and share them out through your varous channels. Google+ also let's you write posts as long as you want and could be used as a place to house your blog posts. Once you're blog is back up and live, you can migrate these posts back over to the blog.

Use your existing social media channels. You can break your content into chunks that fit within the constraints of each channel and tweet, Facebook, pin, Instagram or whatever your content out. Then pull it all together into a post, when your site's back up. You can also use these channels for distribution of other methods, like the one above and the next two.

Create a PDF of your post. Create a post within your computer and then make a PDF of the post. This way, you can make it look very much like it would in your normal blog, but get it into a small, easy to sent file. You can then send it as a tweet, a Facebook post and all the other ways, including email, to distribute content.

Do a video blog post. Share your thoughts in a video. You can simply use the camera on your computer, tablet or phone if you don't have a digital recorder like a Flip camera. You can then upload it to your YouTube site, onto your own website, on your Facebook page and distribute through social media. Then, just embed this video in a post once your site is back up.

Use your email list or eNewsletter. If you have an email list for your blog subscribers or an eNewsletter you send out, use it as a way to keep your content in front of your audience. Simply create your post in an email and send it out to your.list. Let them know that your site is down, but because they are important to you, you're making sure they don't miss out. Again, once you have access to your site again, put those posts into your blog.

Of course the best course is to do things to maximize your chances of never having your site go down. Dino Baskovic suggests these two ways to avoid losing your site.

1. Self Host. This puts the burden of server stack admin and blog platform patches, including security, on you. That said, you or your IT typically can respond to outages faster and in a more personalized manner than relying on a third-party platform. (An alternative to this is managed external hosting, with 24/7/365 live, red-phone technical support.) WordPress.org and a handful of newcomers, such as Ghost.org, make this abundantly simple.

2. CO-LO. Have two or more instances of your entire build on separate servers/VPNs/clouds and IP addresses. You can automate failovers programmatically, or simply do it manually by redirecting the URL via the zone file or DNS, though keep in mind the age-old warning that it can take 24-72 hours for that to propagate worldwide.

There you have it. Now you are armed the next time your blog goes down – although hopefully it never will. What other suggestions do you have for keeping your audience together and informed in case of a blog meltdown?

Mike McClure with helpful contributions from Craig Glaser, Dino Baskovic, Graves De Armond, Nick Nerbonne, Susan Watts, Luke Rumley, Deborah Edwards-Onoro.