I want you to close your eyes for a moment and imagine that you are running a successful online business that affords you all the luxuries life has to offer. You are living the dream, doing what you want, when you want; you live where you please, taking vacations on a whim, waking up when you feel like it, enjoying the "good life" in your lavish beach home. (Can you feel the warm ocean breeze against your face?) Now open your eyes and let the vision fade from your mind... It is difficult to let go of this dream, is it not?

Now imagine a nightmare scenario where you in fact had the successful online business, the beach house, the dream life, and you had no choice but to let it all go because you forgot to follow the number one rule of online marketing: "Thou shall always backup your files" Unfortunately, this exact scenario did actually happen to an acquaintance of mine, and very likely could happen to you. What was his fatal mistake? He foolishly trusted his host to keep a backup of his Website files and important databases. Like most online marketers, he wrongly assumed the host was making daily back-ups of all of the data on their servers. Sadly, as you are about to find out, he could not have been more wrong.