Keep Calm! Website disaster planning for the rest of us

There are plenty of resources that tell you why you need a disaster recovery plan (floods! hackers! snakes!), but it's hard to find good information on how to create one. Disaster preparedness and recovery can be an intimidating and expensive-sounding prospect and most small site owners and developers simply throw their hands up and choose the "close your eyes and pray" technique. This session will change that by outlining a disaster prep plan that works for any site on any budget with any skill level.

Typical disaster recovery advice starts by telling you to make a list of all of the potential threats to your business but is incredibly vague about what you can actually do about those threats. This session takes a different approach. We start with the assumption that you can never predict what will take your site down, but if you are familiar with the various moving parts involved and know how to replace those parts when they fail, then you can face any website emergency with confidence, aplomb and (mostly) dry pants.

In this session we will cover:

• What is a 'Disaster Recovery Plan' and how can you create one
• Listing your site's major points of failure
• How to prevent, detect and recover from failure at each of these points
• Preparation tips to make your disaster response go smoothly