Hurricane Season for Your Business Systems: Backups, DNS, and Communications Before the Cone Appears

Hurricane season in Southwest Florida runs June 1 through November 30 and peaks around September 10, and the systems half of preparing for it takes one afternoon if you do it before a cone appears. This checklist is that afternoon: backups you can restore from a phone, a domain and DNS you control, email and phones that keep working when the office does not, a website banner and Google Business Profile you can update from a shelter, and a way to get paid. Then the order to bring everything back.

Lee County's own after-action reports set the scale. After Ian in 2022, the county needed a cell-on-wheels at its emergency operations center to cover carrier outages, and its EOC stayed at Level 1 for 65 days. After Milton in 2024, 55.5% of LCEC customers were dark on October 10 and under 1% were by October 14. Plan for a week without power at the office and unreliable cell service, while the cloud runs fine somewhere else.

How to think about it

A small business's systems live in three layers, and a hurricane treats them differently.

The building: power, internet, the desktop, the paper files, the phone on the desk. Assume this layer is gone for a week, and possibly under water. The National Hurricane Center's Ian report puts inundation at six to nine feet above ground in Cape Coral and Pine Island, 10 to 15 feet on Fort Myers Beach, and five to eight feet along the Fort Myers riverfront.

The cloud: your website, email, customer records, and payments, if they are hosted by companies with data centers outside Florida. My studio runs on Vercel, Cloudflare DNS, Supabase, Google Workspace, GitHub, Resend, and Wave, and nothing in that list depends on a machine in Cape Coral. The full stack is public.

The link between you and the cloud: your phone, its battery, your passwords, and the device your two-factor codes go to. Most of this checklist is about this layer. The cloud is fine. The owner cannot reach it.

NOAA's August 2026 update gives a 75% chance this season ends below normal, with seven to 13 named storms and zero to two major hurricanes. The outlook is a statistic about the Atlantic. It says nothing about your building.

What should be set up before June 1?

Do this once, then review it every May. Each item is a yes-or-no question.

Data and backups. CISA's rule is 3-2-1: three copies of important files, on two different types of media, with one copy off-site. Automatic, encrypted, with an offline copy, and tested by restoring a file. You should be able to roll back at least seven days.

• Is the customer list in a system with its own backups, not a spreadsheet on the office PC? My CRM lives in Supabase, not on a desktop.
• Do the accounting file, invoices, brand files, and fonts sync to cloud storage automatically?
• Is there a physical drive that leaves the building with you, updated within the last month?
• If the website is built from a Git repository, the repository is the backup. If it is WordPress, does the host take daily backups, and have you downloaded one? My Base Care plan includes daily backups.
• Have you opened a backed-up file from your phone in the last year?

Domain and DNS.

• Is the domain registered in the business's name, with your email on the account, not your web designer's?
• Is auto-renew on, and is the card current?
• Is DNS at a provider with a public status page? Cloudflare's DNS tier is free.
• Is a text export of every DNS record in the off-site backup?
• Are the status pages for your host, DNS, email, and database bookmarked on your phone? Mine are Vercel, Cloudflare, Google Workspace, and Supabase.

Email.

• Is business email on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, not an address tied to your internet provider or hosting account?
• Is there a recovery phone and second contact on the account that is not the office line?
• Is the out-of-office message written and saved where you can reach it without power? Ready.gov's crisis communications guidance calls for pre-scripted messages "stored on a remotely accessible server."

Phones.

• Can you forward the main number from a phone, and do you know the steps? A number that lives in a box in the office dies with the power.
• Is the forwarding procedure printed?

Website.

• Can you turn on a site-wide banner from your phone in under five minutes? On a Next.js or Astro site this is one line and one deploy. If someone else has to do it, do they live in the same evacuation zone?
• Does the site keep serving if nobody touches it? A site served from a CDN with no server of your own behind it does. My studio site on Vercel and The Outpost, a publication WBX Creative built for Power Lodge Florida on Cloudflare Pages, both do.

Google Business Profile.

• Do you have the login, and is it not tied to a former employee?
• Do you know the rule? Special hours for closures up to six consecutive days; Temporarily closed for seven or more days or an unknown period; reopen from the profile. The profile guide covers the rest.

Money.

• Can you send an invoice and accept a card payment from your phone, and have you tested it?
• Does your bank's two-factor go to a phone you will have with you, not the office line?
• Do you know whether you carry flood coverage? NFIP commercial policies cover a building up to $500,000 and contents up to $500,000, start 30 days after purchase with limited exceptions, and do not cover business interruption. Wind and flood are separate claims, and Sanibel's city manager told WGCU in February 2024 that insurers still arguing wind versus flood was a real burden on recovery.
• Are there dated photos of the premises and equipment from before the storm?

People and access.

• Is there a written list of every account (registrar, DNS, host, email, profile, bank, payment processor) with two people who can get into each? Ready.gov's plan calls for current contact lists and a named spokesperson.
• Does the password manager work offline on your phone, and are two-factor backup codes printed and off-site?
• Are you signed up for AlertLee and the LeePrepares app, or Alert Collier, and do you know your evacuation zone? Lee County's hurricane page has the lookup; Collier 311 is 239-252-4311.
• Florida SBDC offers no-cost continuity consulting and plan templates at 866-737-7232.

When the cone appears: 72 hours out

• Take the off-site drive off-site. Confirm the last cloud backup ran by checking its date.
• Charge everything, including the battery bank and the car charger.
• Write three messages now: closing, closed, reopened. Save them in the cloud and as a note on your phone.
• Freeze changes. No DNS moves, no site redesigns, no plugin updates, no new integrations. I learned in 2025 that stacking several kinds of change at once compounds every mistake, without a storm involved.
• Set special hours if you expect to close six days or fewer. Hold off on Temporarily closed until you know.
• Look at the status pages once so you know what normal looks like.
• Move hardware up and out. Drives go in the bag that leaves with you. Anything that stays goes on the highest shelf, unplugged.
• Print the contact list, the account list without passwords, the insurance policy numbers, and the phone-forwarding steps.

24 hours out

• Forward the phone. Turn on the auto-reply. Switch on the banner. Post an Update to the profile.
• Unplug, raise, and photograph everything with timestamps.
• Follow the evacuation order. Lee County ordered 451,869 people out for Ian.

After the storm: what comes back first?

The order matters because each step depends on the one before it.

1. People, then re-entry. The Florida Division of Emergency Management (FDEM) tells businesses to follow local emergency management on when it is safe to return, and to plan for limited access, closed roads, and limited communication. More than half of Lee County's traffic signals were dark on October 2, 2022, and the Pine Island road did not reopen until October 5.
2. Communicate from wherever you are. Update the banner, the profile, the auto-reply, and the voicemail with the "closed" message. If you will be out seven days or longer, set Temporarily closed and put a reminder to reverse it. Lee County's own report credits pre-scripted messaging and communication redundancy for what worked in 2022.
3. Confirm the cloud. Check the status pages, then log into email and the customer system from your phone. If they are up, the business exists. The building is a separate problem.
4. Money. Invoice what is owed. Confirm you can accept payment. Call the insurer immediately and photograph all damage before any repair, which is FDEM's guidance, and keep every receipt.
5. File for help without waiting for insurance. SBA physical disaster loans run up to $2 million, at 4% or less if you have no credit elsewhere and 8% or less otherwise, over up to 30 years, with the first payment and interest deferred 12 months. Economic injury loans go up to $2 million combined. SBA's own fact sheet says do not wait for the insurance settlement to file. After Ian, SBA had approved 19,537 Florida loans totaling about $1.38 billion by January 3, 2023. Florida activated its Small Business Emergency Bridge Loan after both 2024 storms: $15 million at 0% and up to $50,000 per business after Helene, per WUSF, and $50 million after Milton, per the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation. Complete the Business Damage Assessment survey on FloridaDisaster.biz, as FDEM's business page asks. FEMA Individual Assistance is for households; business losses go to SBA.
6. Restore data last, onto new hardware. Never restore onto equipment that got wet. Replace, restore from the off-site copy, verify, then reconnect.
7. Then the office network. Power, internet, router, in that order. Licensed local contractors only, per FDEM.
8. Reopen everywhere at once. Profile, banner, auto-reply, voicemail, a post. Then write down what broke. Helene and Milton hit Lee County 13 days apart in 2024. The second storm is the one that tests whether you took notes.

Mistakes I see

1. The customer list on the office PC. Six to nine feet of water in Cape Coral during Ian, and most desktop towers sit on the floor.
2. The web designer owns the domain. Or the login, or the host. If they are in Zone A, so is your site.
3. Two-factor codes to the desk phone. The bank, the registrar, and the email account all locked, from a shelter, with a dead office line.
4. Changing DNS the day before. Freeze changes when the cone appears.
5. Temporarily closed and forgotten. Google says that for broad queries those profiles can rank after open businesses. Set a reminder.
6. Restoring onto wet hardware. The restore works, the drive fails a week later, and now the backup is gone too.
7. Waiting for the insurance check to file with SBA. SBA says file first.
8. Reading the outlook as a forecast. A below-normal season with one Category 4 landfall is still a Category 4 landfall.

What it costs / what to expect

Most of the standing setup is free or already paid for.

Item	Cost, September 2026 list
Cloudflare DNS	Free
Google Workspace Business Starter	$7 per user per month
Vercel Pro hosting	$20 per seat per month
Off-site drive	One purchase
WBX Base Care (hosting, SSL, daily backups, uptime monitoring)	$50 per month, $40 on annual billing
WBX Technical/IT & Web retainer, for businesses that need someone on call	$1,000–$6,000 per month, three-month minimum
A one-off continuity audit at my hourly rate	$125–$200 per hour

What to expect afterward, from the county's numbers: after Ian, FPL had half of Lee County back in four days and 97% in nine, and LCEC 60% in nine. Cape Coral's water was back five days after Ian, and Fort Myers Beach had a 48-hour boil notice after Milton. A business that can communicate, invoice, and read its own records from a phone during those weeks is still a business when the signals come back on.

Where to go next

If you want the standing setup done by someone who runs one, the technical services page is where continuity and hosting work lives, and the bio covers the systems background. Read the profile guide before you need the closure rules, and if you would rather hand the list over, the contact page is short.