While reviewing emails, I realized that an online proposal on my website was no longer working—instead there was an ugly 404 “Not Found” error page.
This proposal was vital to my business. I had sent it to a warm lead for a hot account. My emotions took over, and I was enraged at the thought of this potential client trying to open the proposal and getting an error page.
I happened to be on a job site with two of the coders who built my gorgeous website. I asked one of them to join me and said in a raised, tense voice, “I can’t have proposals that don’t work going out to potential clients!” He entirely agreed and asked me to remain calm while they figured out what was wrong and how to fix it.
I remained calm. They sprang into action.
My coders identified that our main host, GitLab Pages, had suffered an outage that had no ETA to resolve. In response, they deployed my website to an alternate host, Surge.sh, changed my DNS records to point to the new host, and had my site back up within 15 minutes. They moved my clients’ sites as well. Within half an hour, everything was perfect even though GitLab Pages stayed down for another four hours.
Then, they did much more, without me even asking them to. They implemented uptime monitoring of all Johnnie & Co. websites for all of our clients with automatically failover from one host to another if the site is unreachable for more than 10 seconds. They did this without even thinking of telling our clients we did it, let alone charging them for it. Johnnie & Co. sites are more enterprise-grade than most enterprise websites.
There will always be bumps in the road in business, if not total crash and burns. Having a quick, smart, action-orientated team sometimes makes all the difference in stressful situations.