Business Continuity — Dallas-Fort Worth
When a vendor goes down, your customers should still reach you
Email, hosting, phone and software all fail eventually, sometimes for a day or more. A short continuity plan keeps leads from disappearing and tells customers what to do. Here is how we plan for it, and how we can set it up for your business.
How we plan for it
Six layers, no single point of failure
Each layer covers a different failure. Together they keep you reachable and keep your data safe.
Reach us more than one way
Phone and voicemail at (214) 974-3505, the chat widget on this site and the contact form are separate paths. If one is unavailable, the others still work.
Leads saved before email
For client sites we store each form submission in a database first and send the email second, so a mail outage cannot erase a lead.
Source control and rollback
Our sites are built from a GitHub repository and deployed through Cloudflare Pages, so a bad change can be rolled back to a previous deployment.
Hosting separate from email
The website does not run on the same vendor as your inbox. An email outage does not take the site offline, and a site problem does not stop email.
Outage notice banner
A small site banner that says email is delayed and points visitors to phone or chat. We can switch it on in minutes for client sites.
Email authentication
Correct SPF, DKIM and DMARC records protect deliverability and make recovery smoother after an outage.
Free checklist
An 8-point continuity checklist
Work through these in about 30 minutes. Anything you cannot check off is a gap worth fixing.
- List the 5 vendors your business cannot run without: email, website host, phone, payments, scheduling.
- Publish a second way to reach you on your website: phone number, chat or form.
- Make sure website form submissions are stored somewhere other than only your inbox.
- Write a two-sentence outage notice you can post in under 10 minutes.
- Know who has the logins for DNS, hosting and email, and where the recovery steps are written.
- Keep a recent backup of your website and key documents outside your main vendor.
- Check SPF, DKIM and DMARC for your sending domain.
- Set a calendar reminder to test your plan twice a year.
If it happens today
What to do during an email outage
- Confirm it is the provider and not your device by checking their status page.
- Do not resend the same message repeatedly. Duplicates can arrive once service recovers.
- Post a short notice on your website and voicemail pointing customers to phone or chat.
- Use a second channel for urgent customers: phone, text or an alternate address.
- After recovery, review Sent items and bounce messages for anything that did not deliver.
Questions
Business continuity FAQ
A business continuity plan is a short written plan for how customers can still reach you and how work continues when a key vendor goes down, such as your email provider, website host or phone system. For a small business it can be one page: your critical channels, a backup for each, who switches them on, and how customers are told.
Confirm the outage on the provider's status page, avoid resending the same message repeatedly because duplicates can arrive when service recovers, switch customer-facing contact to a second channel such as phone, chat or a web form, and post a short notice on your website. Afterward, check your Sent items and bounce messages for anything that did not deliver.
Store each submission in a database first and send the email notification second. That way the lead is saved even if the notification fails, and a second alert path such as text message can notify you. Dallas AI Company builds lead capture this way for client sites.
The initial continuity checklist and a short conversation are free. Hands-on work such as backup email routing, outage banners, lead-capture fallbacks or an AI phone and chat fallback is scoped to your setup. Contact us for a quote.
No. The same plan applies to any provider, including Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, website hosts, payment processors and phone services. The goal is that no single vendor outage cuts you off from customers.