What 911 Taught Me About Keeping Websites Up
I’ve been building and running systems for about thirty years. I spent 1997 to 2009 at IBM, where I was lead developer on ThinkPlace, an innovation platform run out of the CIO’s office, and later led the team behind IBM’s virtual worlds initiative, exploring 3D collaboration spaces years before the idea went mainstream. After that came 911Buddy, an emergency connectivity platform I co-founded and ran as CTO. Then digital operations at a marketing agency, fifteen years looking after a regional data platform in Southwest Florida, and now Kinetic Thoughts.
Of all of it, the 911 work changed how I think about everything else the most.
The problem 911Buddy solved
When you call 911 from a cell phone, you reach the dispatch center where you are. That’s exactly what it should do, until the person who needs help is somewhere else. If you were in Florida and your mother fell in Ohio, your 911 call went to Florida.
911Buddy closed that gap. You could type in an address, drop a pin on a map, or save the addresses of people you might one day need to help. The app worked out the right dispatch center for that location and connected you directly. It ran nationwide, in production, not as a prototype.
Four lessons that carried over
1. Decide how it fails before it fails. In an emergency system you can’t wait to find out what breaks. We had to plan for a slow data service, a dropped call, even the phone’s own safety features: on an iPhone, dialing 911 from inside an app closes the app, so we built around direct ten-digit dispatch numbers instead. A website deserves the same thinking at a smaller scale. Before anything goes wrong, know who gets alerted, where the backup is, and who can log in.
2. The dependencies are the system. 911Buddy relied on a location data vendor, a phone service provider and Apple. Any one of them could take it down. A WordPress site is no different: the host, PHP, the theme, every plugin, the domain registrar, DNS and email. Most outages I’ve cleaned up started with a dependency nobody was watching. List yours, and know who owns each one.
3. Boring is the goal. Nobody wants an exciting emergency system. Reliability comes from routine: updates on a schedule, backups that have actually been restored once, monitoring that someone reads. The excitement belongs in the stories told afterward, which is what this blog is for.
4. Know when to stop. We shut 911Buddy down when the economics no longer worked, and it was the right call. Websites reach that point too. Sometimes the responsible answer for an old site isn’t another patch, it’s a replacement or a retirement, planned before an emergency forces it.
Why this matters for a small business site
Your website isn’t a 911 system. But the day it goes down, gets hacked or stops taking orders, it feels like one to you. The habits that keep emergency systems running scale down just fine, and they cost far less than the scramble that comes without them.
If you’d like a second set of eyes on how your site would hold up on a bad day, get in touch with Kinetic Thoughts.