How a driving school should handle contact forms

Maintenance is not glamorous, but it is the reason a driving school has not had downtime since we took over contact forms. The invoice is small and the peace of mind is large.

The worst contact forms failure we have seen at a driving school was invisible for eight months. The backup existed but had never been tested, and the data inside was three migrations old.

Most providers let you export contact forms as a zone file. We keep one in version control for every client. If the hosting vanishes, the zone file rebuilds the domain in minutes.

We deployed a fix for contact forms at 5 PM on a Friday. It worked, but if it had not, we would have had no one available. We no longer push to production after Thursday noon.

Instead of migrating contact forms all at once, we ran both configurations in parallel for a week. The switch happened on a Wednesday morning — the quietest traffic window.

For a driving school, we wrote a three-line script that checks contact forms every morning and emails the owner if anything changes. Total cost: zero.

There is a difference between a site that loads and a site that works. contact forms is part of the second category for a driving school.

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