When Cloudflare went down a few weeks ago, we watched small businesses lose thousands of dollars in a matter of hours, and big businesses lose millions. Some were completely paralyzed. For others, it was a flash in the pan because they had planned ahead.
The businesses that got hit the worst were often the ones that were in growth mode. They’d gone digital. They’d streamlined operations. They had automated processes. They were lean, efficient, and positioned for growth.
But when the internet stopped working, they hit a brick wall.
The difference between businesses that cruised through the outage and businesses that bled revenue wasn’t just about being more or less digital. It was about having a plan for when digital fails.
Your Business Continuity Checklist
Here’s the quick checklist, then we’ll dig into each item further down.
- Enable offline payment options – If you process a lot of payments and regularly ensure your point-of-sale system can process payments offline and batch them later or keep a manual card imprinter. Have cash handling procedures ready.
- Maintain alternative communication channels – Keep a list of customer phone numbers, have a backup email provider (different from your primary), and consider a simple status page on a different hosting provider to update customers.
- Document core processes on paper – Print out your primary workflows, pricing sheets, inventory lists, and customer contact information. For example, product/service price lists with tax calculations, employee schedules with phone numbers, vendor contact sheets, standard email templates for common customer requests, order forms that can be filled by hand, return/refund procedures, and your most common troubleshooting steps. Store these in an accessible binder so staff can operate manually if needed. You don’t need to print these very often, just a couple times per year, just make sure it’s done with some kind of regularity.
- Diversify critical services and practice failover – Don’t put all services with one provider. If your website is on Cloudflare, have your email elsewhere. Consider a secondary internet connection (or a mobile hotspot) for essential functions. For critical systems, document the exact steps to switch over: where to change DNS settings, how to redirect customers to backup sites, login credentials for alternate services (stored securely), and practice this switch at least once a quarter so it’s not your first time during an actual emergency.
- Set up backup email on a different platform – Create a secondary email address with a different provider (Gmail for business/Google Workspace costs $22/user/month, Microsoft 365 is similar, or use a completely different provider like Zoho at $1-3/user/month). Choose a provider in a different “ecosystem.” If your primary is Microsoft, make your backup Google. If primary is Google, use Microsoft or Zoho. No provider is immune to outages, but having them on different infrastructure means they’re unlikely to go down simultaneously.
- Create an emergency contact list for all digital infrastructure – Make a spreadsheet with every critical service: hosting provider, email, payment processor, internet service provider, website platform, etc. For each, document support phone numbers, account numbers, emergency contacts, and their stated SLA. Critically, ask each provider, “What’s your fallback plan if your primary systems fail?” and document their answers. Many have backup regions or manual processes they can invoke. Review this quarterly and update it when vendors change.
- Maintain both cloud AND local backups – Keep local encrypted backups of essential data (customer orders, inventory, financial records) on an external drive stored off-site (safe deposit box, owner’s home, etc.). This protects against both internet outages AND cloud corruption/ransomware scenarios. Test restoration monthly to ensure backups work.
- Create a one-page incident plan – Write down exactly who does what when systems go down: who contacts customers, who processes manual transactions, who monitors for restoration. Include key vendor support numbers.
- Test your systems and set up monitoring – Run a quarterly or every other quarter”fire drill” where your team tests the rollover. You’ll discover gaps you’d never think of when you actually test the rollover. Also, use a free service like UptimeRobot or Pingdom (free tier) to alert you immediately when your website goes down, before customers start complaining. This gives you a head start on activating your backup plan.
The Numbers
Let me walk you through some math that might surprise you.
If your business does $500,000 a year in revenue, that’s roughly $250 per hour during business hours. A four-hour outage doesn’t just cost you $1,000 in direct sales. Add in the labor cost of idle staff, customers who leave and don’t come back, and the reputation damage from social media complaints, and you’re looking at $5,000 – $10,000 in total impact!
That’s significant for a small business.
The good news is that most of the items on this checklist cost very little other than time to implement. They just require some thinking and documentation.
Don’t Overlook The People Part
Many businesses mess this up because they focus on the technology and not on the people.
Your incident plan (item 8) isn’t just a list of phone numbers. It’s about making sure your team is trained on what to do when things go wrong. Who talks to customers? Who calls the vendor? Who keeps working on manual processes?
I’ve seen businesses where everyone panicked because nobody knew who was supposed to do what. The owner was on the phone with tech support while customers walked out because nobody could process payments.
Don’t be that business.
Paper Trails
Paper is so 1980’s, but it works.
Print out your price list with taxes already calculated. Print your vendor contact sheets. Print templates for your most common customer emails so staff can handwrite or text them if needed. Print order forms that can be filled out manually.
I keep mine in a three-ring binder labeled “Emergency Procedures”. When systems go down, my team grabs the binder and keeps working. If it’s done well, customers barely notice. But you will because if your customers are being serviced and your competition’s customers aren’t, they’ll be knocking on your door.
This only costs maybe $20 for printing and a binder. Time investment? A couple of hours to set it up, 30 minutes quarterly to update it.
Backup Email Strategy
Why do you need a second email provider? And is it actually worth it?
First off, you don’t necessarily need an email and backup system for everyone in the business. But, depending on your size, you may want to have at least core systems in place for this and for critical team members.
Email is how you communicate with customers when everything else fails. If your website is down, you need email. If your payment system is down, you need email to coordinate with customers about orders.
If you’re prepared, you can spin up a new email address in about 15 minutes. But that “if you’re prepared” part is critical. You need to have already chosen your backup provider, understand how to set up the domain configuration, and have the login credentials documented somewhere accessible. During an outage is not the time to figure this out for the first time.
Setting up a backup takes maybe an hour. Get a Gmail for business account or a Zoho account (starts at $1/month per user). Set it up with your domain. Document how to access it. Tell your team it exists.
The key is choosing a provider in a different ecosystem. If Microsoft 365 goes down, Google probably isn’t affected. If Google goes down, Microsoft probably isn’t. Pick providers that don’t share infrastructure.
Don’t Fall Into The Local Only Trap!
I’ve watched this pattern play out a few times. A small business gets burned by a cloud outage or two. They decide they’re done with the cloud entirely. Everything goes local. Servers in the office. Files on local drives. No more dependencies on the internet.
They feel safe now, but they are actually in a much more dangerous situation.
First off, they can’t scale like that, but secondly, when you’re on a cloud system, you usually have teams upon teams of people watching everything including security, operations, hardware, etc. Now, with things in-house, it’s just your team, and besides, what happens if the office burns down or someone drops a cup of coffee in just the wrong spot? On top of all that, you can’t take advantage of modern tools that could grow your business.
The answer isn’t choosing between cloud and local. It’s having both. Cloud systems for growth and efficiency, local backups for resilience.
That’s the balance that actually works.
What To Ask Your Vendors
Before I started a support company, I never would have thought to ask my vendors this question, but now it’s one of the first things we ask:
“What’s your fallback plan if your primary systems fail?”
Document their answer. Many providers have backup regions or manual processes they can activate. Knowing these exist before an emergency means you can ask for them during an emergency.
The Reality of Redundancy Costs
I know what you’re thinking. This sounds expensive. It’s not.
Let’s break down the actual costs:
- Backup email provider: $1-12/month per user
- Manual card imprinter: $50 one-time purchase
- Mobile hotspot for backup internet: $20-50/month (or use your phone’s hotspot for free)
- External hard drive for backups: $50 one-time
- Monitoring service: Free tier available
- Printing documentation: $20 one-time
- Time to set everything up: 4-6 hours
Total first-year cost for a small team: probably under $500. Ongoing annual cost: probably under $200.
Compare that to the cost of a single four-hour outage (potentially $5,000-10,000), and the math becomes pretty clear.
Start With One Thing
My recommendation is to just start with item 8: create your one-page incident plan. That’s the foundation everything else builds on. Spend an hour this week documenting who does what when systems fail. Or, talk to your favorite AI about it and have it done in 10 minutes.
Then next week, tackle the paper documentation. Week after that, set up monitoring. Build the system gradually.
The goal isn’t perfection. The goal is to be better prepared tomorrow than you are today.
You Don’t Need to Do Everything
You don’t need to implement every item on this checklist to be significantly better off than you are now. Pick the three or four that make the most sense for your business and start there.
A restaurant might prioritize offline payment options and printed pricing sheets. An e-commerce site might focus on backup email and monitoring alerts. A service business might emphasize the emergency contact list and communication channels.
Do what makes sense for your specific situation.
While you’re thinking about continuity and resilience, make sure you’re covering the basics of information security too. None of this matters if you get hit with a ransomware attack or a successful phishing scheme wipes out your data.
Make sure you have:
- End-to-end encryption for sensitive customer data
- Updated antivirus and anti-malware software on all systems
- Regular phishing attack training for everyone on your team (seriously, this is how most breaches happen)
- Two-factor authentication on all critical accounts
- Regular password updates using a password manager
- Clear policies about what gets shared in emails versus secure channels
Business continuity isn’t just about surviving internet outages. It’s about building a business that can weather whatever comes its way, whether that’s a technology failure, a security breach, or just the normal chaos of running a growing company.
Start with what you can do today. Build from there. Your future self will thank you.
Author:
Jason Long, CEO
Jason Long is the founder and CEO of JHMG and SupportMy.Website. He is a serial problem solver and entrepreneur with 25 years of experience in business building. Jason’s ventures range from agriculture to healthcare with a focus on web-based technology. He has extensive experience in software development and has operated as a developer, UX designer, graphic designer, project manager, director, executive coach, and CEO. At JHMG, he operates not only as the leader of the organization but also as a SaaS Consultant helping businesses start, build, grow, scale, and exit their SaaS businesses.
Jason is also an experienced world traveler who regularly visits destinations worldwide and is passionate about community growth, social issues, fitness, and family.
Jason Long’s Linkedin
Website: JasonMLong.me
X: @jasonmlong