Hurricane Jeanne and instant disaster recovery

There are some benefits of living in New Jersey. Lack of hurricanes is the one foremost in my mind of late. Last year, we moved The Tolly Group to South Florida. In the past six weeks, we experienced more downtime than in a decade's worth of New Jersey summers. Disaster recovery, not surprisingly, rose up higher on the priority list.

Like most small businesses, one has to balance the time, effort and cost of back-up and recovery plans against the likelihood that said plans will be put to use. Given that, in more than a decade, we'd never lost power for any significant amount of time: A "cross-your-fingers" plus UPS strategy seemed acceptable. That would get us through those short "brownouts" so popular in New Jersey. It did not get us through Hurricane Frances.

While our Boca Raton headquarters was fortunate enough to be away from the eye, the area suffered significant damage, and, not surprisingly, power went out. In Palm Beach County, more than 500,000 homes and businesses went dark - and stayed dark.

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There are some benefits of living in New Jersey. Lack of hurricanes is the one foremost in my mind of late. Last year, we moved The Tolly Group to South Florida. In the past six weeks, we experienced more downtime than in a decade's worth of New Jersey summers. Disaster recovery, not surprisingly, rose up higher on the priority list.

Like most small businesses, one has to balance the time, effort and cost of back-up and recovery plans against the likelihood that said plans will be put to use. Given that, in more than a decade, we'd never lost power for any significant amount of time: A "cross-your-fingers" plus UPS strategy seemed acceptable. That would get us through those short "brownouts" so popular in New Jersey. It did not get us through Hurricane Frances.

While our Boca Raton headquarters was fortunate enough to be away from the eye, the area suffered significant damage, and, not surprisingly, power went out. In Palm Beach County, more than 500,000 homes and businesses went dark - and stayed dark.

We've been through two more hurricanes since then (Ivan and Jeanne) so I can't even recall how long we were down, but it was many days. No Web, no e-mail - as a company we appeared to vanish. Not good.

Once we came back online after Frances, we began to investigate ways to keep (at least) our Web online and our e-mail system going. But, in less than two weeks - before we could even finish researching our options - Hurricane Jeanne struck. It followed an eerily identical path as Frances, and - bam - down went our power.

Florida Power & Light was ready this time. Ready, that is to lower expectations. Their official announcement as the storm moved through the area was, and I'm not joking, "All power will be restored within three weeks." I felt ill.

With little else to do from my broadband-enabled evacuation enclave, I decided that doing something was better than doing nothing and decided to give "instant disaster recovery" a fling.

My plan: Find a hosting service not in Florida that supports ASP.NET, open an account, use FTP to copy the backup of the Web site I keep on my laptop - including the several hundred documents we've published in the past decade or so, call Qwest to change the DNS to point to the hosting site, be back online.

About two hours later, without any calls required to FlareHosting - which I picked off Google - and with just one phone call to Qwest, we were back online - even though power to our building was still (as it turned out) more than a day away. I couldn't believe it. Oh, and it is costing me less than $1 per day for my back-up site.

Kudos to FlareHosting, which certainly appears to have its act together, but kudos also to Microsoft for its ASP.NET architecture. I had absolutely no administrative access to my new Web server, and I didn't need it. I simply copied over my .Net programs and databases, and it just ran.

Power came on as we were switching over our SMTP to service provider VirtualConnect.Net. While their main focus is "scrubbing" your incoming e-mail, they also can hold on to your mail (like MailKeep) should your main system lose power. That, too, was a snap to set up.