My entire portfolio website went offline during a gallery submission window

It was a Friday afternoon, and I was putting the final touches on my submission for the 'Emerging Visions' online gallery. I had everything ready, hit refresh to double-check the image quality, and got a 503 error. My hosting provider had a server outage, and the estimated fix time was 'several hours.' The submission deadline was midnight. I panicked, but then I remembered I had a full backup on an external drive from the day before. I quickly created a free Carrd site, uploaded my five key pieces, and wrote a short note to the gallery curator explaining the situation with a link to the temporary site. I got the submission in with 45 minutes to spare. Has anyone else had to scramble like this? What's your go-to backup plan for your online portfolio?

3 comments

3 Comments

tessap9723d ago

My backup plan is usually just hoping my ancient laptop doesn't finally give up... it's more of a 'backup prayer' than a plan. I did have to quickly throw my stuff onto a Google Drive once when my site got a weird virus. The scramble felt like trying to put out a fire with a water pistol.

shah.xena23d ago

Honestly, my backup plan is way more boring than yours, I just keep a live mirror on a cheap second host. TessaP97's 'backup prayer' method sounds way too stressful for me.

the_thomas23d ago

Look at what you're both describing. It's just a personal website. How often does it actually go down? The stress seems out of place for a hobby project. A cheap mirror is fine, but the panic over a virus or a dead laptop is overblown. Most of the time nothing happens. You just fix it slowly if it breaks.