Computers break occasionally.

Since internet marketing relies on computers, it’s important to know when things break so you can fix them!

The problem is that not all problems are easy to spot.

Or even if you do spot them, they may not be easy to fix.

My normally excellent autoresponder company – Aweber – recently experienced something called a DDos attack.

Essentially that’s an attempt (successful in this case) to break a website and make it unavailable.

If I’d just been using Aweber to send out a series of pre-written messages then chances are I would only have noticed a dip in sales or responses – if I’d noticed anything.

But because I send fresh content to my list most days, I found out when I couldn’t get their site to load.

So I checked a free service that runs a few checks to find out whether the site was just down for me (sometimes Firefox gets overloaded with cookies and refuses to load pages, sometimes it’s a glitch with my internet provider) or not.

It turned out I wasn’t alone, so I checked a popular forum and found out more details.

Aweber were busy working with other companies to overcome the problem, so they hadn’t sent out a message.

And big companies are usually quite coy about alerting more people than necessary, so that’s not unusual.

I’ve also used companies who report that “some” customers are experiencing difficulties when they really mean “everyone” but don’t want to cause more panic and upset than has already happened.

With computers, you can sometimes use backups, sometimes not.

If you’ve got a small website with not too much traffic it would be overkill to spread it across more than one server “just in case”.

For critical sites, I use a monitoring service. They offer a free option but because these sites are critical I’ve upgraded to the paid-for option.

That kind of service means you know about a problem before your website host does – always assuming they do more than a very basic check to essentially see whether or not the server is switched on.

With Aweber, there isn’t much you can do when things break.

They host the list and you can download it as a backup – something I don’t really do often enough.

But even with the list, there’s not much I could do.

A bulk send from my computer would take me over my internet service providers limits.

And with a pre-written sequence there’s no way you’d know where people had got to. Plus they’d get a duplicate message when Aweber came back.

Importing the list into a new provider is difficult as well. Almost all autoresponder companies expect new subscribers to opt in again, so I’d lose a chunk of my list who thought it was more effort than it was worth.

On the plus side, most links inside any emails that had already been sent out would work.

I rarely use the built-in option of link tracking.

I think the links are ugly.

I’ve also been told that they don’t work in every email program in existence – I know my email program has a dislike for GetResponse links so that’s believable.

So I send links via my website using a plugin called WP Shorties.

So – phew! – links in emails that have already been sent worked.

Which wasn’t the case for most of the emails in my (very quiet) inbox.

My guess is the outage hit a lot of people.

Including myself – almost all my products are set up to collect your email address before you get sent by Aweber to the download page.

So when Aweber breaks, so does my product delivery.

Which doesn’t look good for me – I’m rethinking that at the moment but don’t know whether I’ll come up with a solution or whether it’s over the top to do that for something that’s only happened once for this length of time. A bit like the UK’s preparation for bad weather – it deep snow doesn’t happen often enough to make it worth investing large amounts of money for a few days every few years.

All of this is a trade-off.

The amount of time and money and effort expended versus the likelihood of something breaking.

But a simple thing like the website monitoring are definitely worthwhile in my view.

If your own internet connection goes down, you can usually cope by going elsewhere or talking nicely to a friend. So that’s rarely an issue for long.

Emails are a big hassle but I can’t think of an easy alternative. Hosting your own email list is fraught and you need a degree in geek speak to get them set up, even assuming you could persuade people to re-join your list.

The other big thing that can break is anything you’re an affiliate for.

Most affiliate programs don’t notify you if something is broken.

Commission Junction is the only network I’m a member of that tells me when I send a click to a link that’s no longer working.

A handful of others probably do the same but networks like Clickbank, Warrior Plus, Digi Results and JVZoo don’t have that in place.

Nor do the various private affiliate programs I’m in.

It’s awkward.

And, depending on the amount of potential cash involved, up to you how often you check.

Broken link checkers don’t help much with that either – often the page or site is still there, just not in a form that earns you any money.

It’s all part of doing business.

But you need to put in place something to handle when the most important parts of your internet marketing business break for whatever reason.

If you’ve got any thoughts on this, feel free to add them in the comments box below.