For a couple of months last winter, the UK was hit by gale force winds and a months worth of rain in just days. Homes and businesses had been flooded and the rain kept on coming. Fortunately, it didn’t affected me much but for others if had been an absolute nightmare!Businesses were losing money because they had to shut up shop as the flood water entered their premises and others had lost a lot of trade because nobody could get to them. Also some homes and businesses had been without power for weeks.Would an online business be affected by these kinds of storms?To a degree, yes but not the same kind of damaging scale as a normal bricks and mortar business. If you run your online business from home then your home could still get flooded… but your business can still be running in the background.If you have no power to your home, you won’t be able to log onto the internet to do updates to your websites or other online tasks… but it is still running online on the server.People can still come to your website and order from you, auto responder emails will still be sent. A few customers with power cuts won’t be able to order from you but as your business is open to a global market this will have very little affect on your profits.However, if you sell physical products there could be some delivery issues if you can’t get to the post office or the post office is flooded! So you might get cancellations if you can’t get the products out to your customers.Digital products though such as eBooks, ecourses, membership websites etc won’t be affected by delivery problems.Normal bricks and mortar businesses will need to wait for the floods to reside, get their premises back up together before they can let customers back through the door!An online business will still be able to take orders even if your office or home is flooded. You won’t need to shut up shop completely until the floods reside and your premises refitted.Think how damaging it would be to your life if you couldn’t trade for 2 months or more.So in these kind of storms an online business will still have an advantage over other businesses. Quite a big advantage!Maybe you could use an online business as a second income stream to your main business and then at least you still have some money coming in if something like this happens to you.Once you’ve got to grips with online marketing and you have many online customers your profits may even start to exceed your traditional businesses as your expenses costs are much, much less!You may even decide to close your traditional business and continue as an online business only. Some companies have already done this.So get an online business started today whether you already have a traditional business or are looking to start a new business from scratch. An online business has so many more advantages.