Checking that things are working as expected is maybe the most important thing you can do in your business.

It’s easy to assume that computers are doing the thing you asked them to but they can (and do) stop doing things without notice and without any prior warning signs.

On your computer and phone, you’re probably used to updates happening. Often weekly.

The same (sometimes) happens on your hosting – that depends on the package you’re on and how pro-active your host is.

And the same often happens with the services you use. There are plenty of updates at sites like Paypal, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Most of the time, those happen smoothly.

Sometimes they’re big enough to get fixed fast like Facebook’s glitch recently.

But a lot of the time, they’re relatively minor changes that just happen.

The problem for web developers is that it’s next to impossible to test for every possible thing that could go wrong. Most of the time they’ll check the major things. But occasionally someone will have done something non-standard or that “used to work” but was never explicitly in the spec.

Minor changes – especially behind the scenes – are the reason that it’s rare for computer software to offer free lifetime support. Those minor changes are the reason most scraping tools suddenly stop working until the developer changes their code to cope.

But even if it’s not explicitly software, it’s worth checking.

• Signup forms can and do break. Or the message that was supposed to be sent out on signup somehow doesn’t get sent.
• Email boxes can fill up to overflowing – despite disk space being almost zero cost, a lot of web based email programs have a limit on the amount of storage you can use. Partly because “almost zero” mounts up when you’ve got thousands or millions of users.
• Domains don’t get renewed. That’s why a lot of people like products they’ve bought to be downloadable – it’s not a good feeling when you go back to a product you’re bought only to be faced with a “this domain is for sale” message. Even if the domain is still working, sometimes access to the product ceases to exist – maybe the host has been changed, maybe too many bad guys got the download link so that’s been changed, maybe something broke and the backup didn’t work as expected.
• Affiliate programs change – the vendor changes network or decides to stop using affiliates entirely.

The list seems to go on forever.

Check the important things more regularly than the lesser things.

But do check them.

I remember a few years ago that an email I sent to one of my suppliers wasn’t answered as promptly as normal. So I phoned them – this was back when you could actually find a number to call – and their response was that they thought their emails had been quiet that morning. Translation: no messages received.

It happens.

But a few checks every now and then can reduce the number of times things happen and the length of time they happen – or don’t happen – to a fairly small length of time.

Get checking!