It’s not surprising when it does happen.  There are customers who are upset.  There are investors who are upset.  There are engineers and admins feverishly working at all hours of the day and night.  Servers are quiet.  It’s an eerie moment that those who work in this situation don’t like to have happen very often.  Unless you’re a consultant who receives a wad of cash every time it happens.

Website outages can and are often survived with minor injuries.  Most customers will forgive and forget when they are given their access back to their precious daily activities and are assured everything remains safe.

What is surprising is the lack of preparation many companies have for disasters.  Some don’t even know what disaster recovery is.  Being able to cope with an outage within an hour and be back online with at least some functionality if not all is as important as making sure the income is still coming in.  It doesn’t take long for a customer to browse elsewhere.

Today Netflix had an outage for about 12 hours.  This supposedly delayed their shipments for a day.  Customers won’t be seeing their movies for another day.  At this time, there is no word on the cause.  A minor hiccup, but one that could have repercussions.

Having another server available to display a message to your customers is a first step.  Letting them know there’s a tiny problem and that you know about and are working on it helps comfort those who are nervous of the effects of not reaching the site they intend.

If you have a website that is even remotely mission critical, research and devise a backup plan.  It may not be worth the time and cost, but there shouldn’t be very many people who want to take the chance if given a choice.  You want to not know there could have been an outage rather than have one and all your customers staring at you.

In the last several years, there has been an effort to get bills that were once mailed by the post office online for access electronically. This provides a number of benefits, but also brings a number of drawbacks.

E-bills can be delivered within days of the closing of the billing period. No need to wait over a week for the mail to arrive, visit the mailbox, and hope to get the statements delivered to you. Just login, click E-bills, and select the month you want. You have 6-24 months of bills at your fingertips. You can also download the statements in a number of formats. Save the PDF copies that look just like the paper statements, and you’re good.

Not exactly. You have to remember to save your statements offline, or after twelve months, you could end up losing all the records of the previous months. Some companies will discard your statements and then charge you archive fees to retrieve copies, if they still have them.

You don’t have to worry about identity theft from your mailbox. Many banks allow automatic payment and storage when they receive the E-bills in your account. They also notify you when they receive the electronic statement, or when you haven’t paid a statement due soon.

I prefer to have the best of both worlds. If I can receive the paper statement for my records and pay using a credit card online, I’m game for it. I don’t have to fuss with looking up the paper statements when I’m already online. Some companies force you into signing up for E-bills if you want to pay online.

What seemed to have disappeared recently is the bonus you get when you sign up for E-bills. Companies used to give a couple of bucks for signing up. They transitioned to donating the dollar to organizations, like planting a tree. Now they just sign you up and reap the savings of postage and printing.

And some will charge you for the paper bill. Even more income to look forward to.

A relatively new feature that websites have added are the pop up info blocks on particular links in page content. The double underlined links that you move your mouse over without clicking on and a little box appears. You move your mouse away from the link, and the box disappears.

Those little boxes can contain definitions of words, advertisements to lead you to products, or include miniature screen shots of the websites you see if you click to follow the link to.

For quick dictionary definitions, you may find it very quick and easily to utilize. Reading and you don’t understand the meaning of the word? Just mouse over the word and you have an instant definition. The same goes with the screen shots, though there’s not much you can really see at such a small scale.

As for advertising, it gets to be more annoying than helpful. If you’re moving your mouse around and you happen to impede on the space of the link, you’re looking at an advertisement that will stay there for more than the time it takes you to leave the space.

It can be so annoying that you will choose to disable JavaScript in order to avoid the rude awakening. Do they really make that much of a difference from traditional advertisements? You don’t see them on the page, which clears up the real estate to less flashy advertisements. They do provide more data for advertisers to play with, for example, user interaction with the page and their advertisements

Caution should be used when money is needed in return for annoying advertisements. It may not be worth the annoyance.

It was only a few years ago when entering your credit card number online to buy something was risky.  Today, you enter more financial information with credit card, banking, utility, and other sensitive information.  Websites offer to store your credit card and all you have to do is login, select the product, and click Buy.

Saving your credit on file may seem conveinent, but that can become a hassle if you aren’t mindful of how easy it is to charge.  I don’t mean your own emotions of a spending spree.  A reoccuring monthly payment to a utility can turn into an overpriced refund check weeks later.  If you disconnect a service and they inform you of the final amount, they may not charge you the new amount, but rather the larger older amount.  You’ll have to wait weeks to get a refund via paper check.

For those rare occasions, a monthly biller could have issues with their billing system that could charge you two or more times the amount due.  They too may wait weeks before giving you your money back.   It doesn’t cost them anything, but can gain a chunk of interest if made a common business practice.

It may take discipline and extra time every month to pay the bills, but automatic payment doesn’t always pay for the time saved.  You may end up with more time on the phone than a year’s worth of time spent paying the bill manually.

It used to be that you only needed a username and password to log into your bank account online. Today they have images to help you visually verify quickly with a small probability of error that you are on the bank’s website and not on a phishing site. Select an image that most closely relates to you and they will show it to you after you enter a username each time you login. If you can identify with it, continue entering your sacred password and you’re in. It helps you to identify with the website, not the website identifying you.

There’s a flaw in this. Anyone can type in the username of your account and determine the image. A simple fetch of the page while a fake page is “verifying” your username can return the image.

So the new technology is to include your cellphone in the process. When you login, your cellphone receives a text message with a code that you suppose to type into the webpage. If the code matches, you’re given access to your account. This is great if you have a cellphone with unlimited text messages. If you can’t receive text messages, your account security isn’t as safe as it could be.

What if your phone is stolen? Just let customer support know and they will disable the feature. Then you just have to worry about the contacts and other information (like passwords) on your cellphone that you don’t have anymore. Security is only as good as the person or service that knows the key. Change your passwords and pin numbers often to avoid losing your money. It can take some time to reverse any compromises to your financial life.