Today Wednesday November 19, 2008 a major outage occurred when online service provider AWeber reported outages that could last all day.  It was a major wake-up call for  many online marketing companies that use AWeber software, email newsletters and autoresponders, email marketing, email auto responders and email newsletters. 

Just in time of the holiday season this system-wide outage from AWeber could cost online businesses hundreds if not thousands of dollars in new business revenue and online sales leads. When we visited the AWeber web site the domain appeared online – but the web page appeared totally blank.  We checked with associates in California and Florida to confirm the outage using different ISP providers and indeed AWeber was down.

We certainly like AWeber services - as a loyal customer for more than 2 years we have found the service top-notch. When we contacted AWeber support today the tech questioned our web sites first, and then proceeded to explain perhaps we were having problems. We explained the outage was checked across several web sites and various ISPs in other states. The tech went on to explain the service was being worked on and would be resolved soon.

Later in the afternoon as our Google Ads continued running and the phones continued ringing as new business prospects could not find our sign-up forms.  We decided to call AWeber support again to now learn that indeed the outage was confirmed and the tech team was working on it.  In fact they went on to tell us the outage could be the better part of the entire day. We wish they would have been more direct about the problem earlier. 

Today we certainly learned a very valuable web marketing lesson the hard way. You need to spread your business around and have backup vendors and systems.  Having 43,000 businesses relying on one company may not be a good thing for companies like ours.  Our business can’t be dependant on AWeber or any other supplier that could have an outage.

Our tip is this, If you outsource and use email services like AWeber you would be smart to always have a backup supplier ready to step-in and take over in a minutes notice.  We did have secondary accounts with providers like FormSite.com and SalesForce.com that could provide duplicate service  - but because of how well AWeber service were working we never implemented a back-up plan. Today the plan was implemented the plan. We can now swap out critical new business sign-up scripts in less that 2 minutes in the event of another AWeber outage.

You can bet after today – we won’t be alone.  You should always have a backup process like this to prevent costly outages like this from happening. It is just good business to always be able to duplicate your email marketing and AWeber software forms, email newsletters and auto responders.