One of things I constantly stress is backup.  When writing web applications we are often focused on the results we want from the application that we can easily forget the underlying infrastructure including the database.  Your beautiful Ruby-on-Rails app is only as good as long as the underlying database structure is alive.  Keep it alive with good database backup.
Read more

… or more importantly, your clients stuff. According to the National Archives & Records Administration in Washington, D.C., 93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. Of those companies, 50% filed for bankruptcy immediately. Please, I beg you, backup your data. This not only provides a way to go back to that design the client decided they liked from last week, but also to recover from accidental and unexpected data loss. Read more