Contingency Plans
We sometimes get asked by clients about certain "what if" scenarios. There are risks with any service provider, whether big or small. Our goal is to minimize and alleviate any concerns about risks. Below are some common questions and our responses to them. If you have any other questions or concerns please do not hesitate to contact us.
Q: What if you go out of business?
A: The first answer to that is that we have no plans to close up shop. We are a growing company and our long-term plan is to keep on growing. We want to build a company that provides good jobs, a healthy, fun and rewarding work environment and that gives back to society and our community. With that said, if we were ever to go out of business (again, not likely) then we would be open and communicate that with all of our clients. We would make our hosted software available for download so that clients could take their website in it's current form and host it elsewhere. We never want to put you in a situation where you could lose your website.
Q: What if you get bought out by another company?
A: We are not seeking to get bought by another company. For some companies, they have a definite exit strategy and their whole goal is to build a company that get's bought out by another company. That is not our goal. The reason that we started building our own software years ago is that we felt that we could do better than what is out there. However, you never know what the future holds. If the right company and the right deal came along then we might consider it. If we were to sell to another company it would have to be to a company that is committed to our current customers and committed to keeping the Aptuitiv software alive and growing. Again, we would be open and communicate with all of our customers what we're doing and why we're doing it.
Q: How is my website backed up in case something happens with the hosting environment?
A: We strive to provide a scalable, redundant and robust hosting environment. All of our servers, including the web servers, file servers and database servers, are backed up daily to handle worst-case scenarios. Each server could be restored to that daily snapshot. We encourage clients to periodically download the site files (images, CSS, Javascript, etc) for their own website as we do not backup the files individually for individual sites. We are currently working on building a scalable system that can handle a separate, redundant backup for individual site databases so that we could restore individual sites or tables.
Q: What if I want to move my website to another provider? What sort of access do I have to my data?
A: We try our best to build a system where you are not locked into our platform. If you want to leave we are sad to see you go but we will not make you jump through hoops or make it difficult to do so. We do not provide direct access to the database for a site, but a lot of our apps have the ability to export data as a CSV file. You can use that to import into another system. You can download all of the asset files (images, CSS, Javascript, video, etc) either through FTP or through the built-in file browser. Another common way to download a site is to use a "site sucker" or "website download" program. SiteSucker is an example program. Those types of programs will download all pages, images, CSS and other files so long as there is a publicly accessible link to it.
