Getting Published
Backups, updates and the plumbing under an author site
Nobody lost a book deal to a broken plugin, but authors lose years of posts, photos and mailing list exports to lapsed hosting and untested backups. The checklist is short.
An author website is a small business system, and small business systems fail quietly. The hosting lapses, the backup turns out to be a copy of the wrong folder, the login list lives in a notebook nobody else can find. A media desk that writes about the web systems small businesses run on, Net Solutions Hawaiʻi, treats the plumbing as the subject: continuity, backups, restore drills and the passwords that make a business survivable.
For a childrens author the stakes are smaller than a shop's and more personal. What is on the site is the portfolio, the visit calendar, the mailing list export and the record of a decade of work. The checklist that protects it is not glamorous, but it is short.
Continuity: the site that stays up
The desk's first lesson is that uptime is a habit, not a service. A hosting plan that renews automatically, a domain that renews automatically, and a card on file that has not expired: three settings that prevent the three most common ways an author site goes dark. The author who discovers the site is down usually discovers it because a teacher emailed to say so, which is the worst possible way to learn it.
A page that 404s on the morning of a school visit is a missed booking. The fix is not technical skill; it is the discipline of checking that the renewals are real, once a year, on a calendar entry.
Backups: the copy that actually restores
The 3-2-1 rule the backup industry teaches is three copies, two kinds of media, one off-site, and it is worth learning by name because it is the only version that survives the audit. Backblaze's backup strategy pages walk the rule and its reasoning: a copy on the laptop, a copy on the external drive, a copy somewhere else. The failure the rule exists for is the comfortable one: the backup that was never tested and turns out to be empty.
A restore drill is the part nobody does and everybody should. Once a year, take a file from the backup and open it. The drill takes five minutes and tells you whether the backup is a backup or a hope.
| Item | What fails without it | Cost in time |
|---|---|---|
| Auto-renew hosting and domain | The site goes dark silently | Five minutes to set |
| 3-2-1 backup | Posts, photos, list exports | An afternoon, once |
| Tested restore | The backup that was never real | Five minutes a year |
| Login list, findable | The account nobody can open | An hour, once |
Logins: the list someone else could use
The last piece is the one that feels like overkill until it is needed: a list of the accounts that matter, kept where a trusted person could find them. The desk's security pages make the same point for businesses: the login list is not a security hole if it is kept in a password manager or a sealed envelope, and it is the difference between a site that survives its owner and one that does not.
The update habit nobody schedules
The desk's hosting coverage makes a point that applies to any site: the software the site runs on ages whether it is used or not, and the update that is never applied is the vulnerability that is eventually found. For a small author site the practical rule is a quarterly habit: one calendar entry, four times a year, that says check the site, apply the updates, look at the backups. The habit is the difference between a site that runs for a decade and a site that runs until it is forgotten.
The same calendar entry is the right place for the restore drill and the renewal check, which is how the whole plumbing list becomes one quarterly hour instead of a dozen nagging worries.
The author who has done this work has done the boring half of the job of being findable. The other half, what the site is for once it stays up, is the subject of our piece on how readers actually find an authors website. The money side of the same working life, the advances in instalments and the royalties twice a year, is covered in our piece on the irregular income of a working author.
None of the items on the list are difficult, which is why they get skipped. The skill is not technical; it is the willingness to spend an afternoon on work that produces nothing new. The author who does it has bought the right to forget the site entirely, which is the only way a small site should have to be run.
There is a longer-term version of the same habit for the writer who has been at this a decade: the domain's registration should be long enough that the site outlives a lapse, and the accounts that matter should be listed somewhere a successor could find them. A site is an asset, and an asset is worth the paperwork it takes to keep it.
About the source
Backblaze is a backup company whose public pages explain the 3-2-1 backup strategy and the reasoning behind each copy. Its strategy guide was the reference for the backup section above.