A CEO I advise canceled the company's hosting account
A CEO I advise canceled the company's hosting account, expecting the servers to keep running until the end of the month.
They were deleted that day. Any backup stored with the same provider went with them.
The business survived because of an instruction I had given his developers years earlier: snapshot the servers on a schedule and copy them to Google Cloud, a separate company under a separate account.
It was a small line on a monthly bill until the day it became the only copy of the business.
Now put that click in the middle of a system replacement. The new vendor's plan assumes the old data exists. The old vendor's contract decides what happens to it on cancellation, and that clause gets read after the click.
Three questions for this week:
Where is the most recent copy of our data, and does it sit in an account the company running our servers cannot touch?
When did someone last restore it and prove it opens?
Who controls the login to that account, us or the developer?
The third one decides what you can still reach on the day a studio stops answering.