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The Ultimate Hosting Nightmare

5 Years of Product and Customer Data Gone

Is your website backed up regularly? Do you have a contingency plan in place if your website is infected with malware (malicious software) or hacked? If not, you’re playing with fire, and it is all but guaranteed that eventually your website will be attacked, resulting in potentially catastrophic data loss.

Recently, one of our clients who hosts an e-commerce store on GoDaddy contacted me to see if I could help figure out why their site was down. So, I looked into it, and discovered that their database had been completely wiped out. That’s over 1,000 products and 5 years of customer data gone, just like that, and they had not been backing up their database.

GoDaddy Will Have a Backup, Right?

I proceeded to contact GoDaddy, and was told that for $150 they could restore the database, and that it would take 7-10 days. That’s good news, but I wanted to know how this happened, so it could be prevented in the future. They couldn’t give me an answer. They just said nothing had been done on their end that would have caused removal of the data. Translation, “It’s not our problem.”

Upon further investigation, GoDaddy realized they actually did not have any backups of this database, and proceeded to remind me that the customer is responsible for maintaining all backups per their Terms of Service. Whoops! Now, the $150 GoDaddy restore was no longer an option.

The result? This client will now have to rebuild their e-commerce store from scratch.

While I’m extremely dissatisfied with GoDaddy’s lack of support regarding this issue (though the customer support reps I spoke with were very nice), this could have happened with any hosting provider. The only way our client could have prevented this was by maintaining regular backups.

Bottom Line

The bottom line is if your site is ever compromised, regardless of the reason, it will be your responsibility to fix it. Without backups, fixing may mean rebuilding. Your website is an investment, and performing regular backups is a cheap insurance policy.

If you haven’t backed your site up lately, I recommend starting now.

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New Review Extensions for Google AdWords

On June 27th, Google announced the new beta release of AdWords Review Extensions, which will now allow businesses to include a snippet of a testimonial or review from a third party right on their search ad. This new extension could be very beneficial to businesses looking to increase their credibility within their search ads.

Review Extensions Details

As shown in the provided image above, businesses will have the opportunity to submit either a direct quotation of the review or a summary of the main point of the review. The review snippet will be placed on the bottom of the search ad followed by the name of the source publication, which will be linked to the publication’s website. This is where the destination URL can be set to the page where the full review is showcased. Clicks on the this link will not be counted as chargeable by Google.

The review snippets will be limited to 67 characters, including the number of characters in the source publication name, and all review snippets must be of high-quality and from a reputable third party source.

All reviews must be pre-approved for use by the source publication and must comply with standard AdWords policies. To prevent abuse from spammers and questionable businesses, and to help ensure policy compliance, Google has put in place automated and human-based systems to review and validate all review extensions.

Leverage Digital Media is a Tampa PPC Company. Please call us at (866) 611-6267 or submit our contact request form for more information regarding our AdWords campaign management services.