Building a website can feel like a great achievement! As you focus on driving traffic to your site and promoting new content, don’t forget about other important aspects though. Maintaining current website backups is a crucial step to ensuring your site is available. In this post, we’ll talk about some of the things you can do to protect your content and make your life easier when managing your backups.
What are website backups?
A website backup is basically just the content that you created to get your site online. It can be a bit more involved than that though. If you are using cPanel backups, then you are also backing up your databases, email, FTP accounts, and much more. This is good because it can ensure that you can easily transfer your account to another hosting provider if you needed to (as an aside, we provide Free cPanel Account Transfers on all of our plans). It’s also a very convenient way to perform backups – just login to cPanel and generate a new backup and download it.
Did you know? At ExiaHost, we provide free cPanel account transfers on all of our hosting plans. Just let us know when you sign up and we’ll take care of the transfer for you.
What if I’m using something like WordPress?
Many Content Management Systems today offer easy ways to export or backup your site content. For example, WordPress has a multitude of plugins that fit this need. Something like UpdraftPlus for instance has great functionality in its free tier for creating a website backup and storing it in a remote location.
Why do I need backups?
A current backup is important for your site for many reasons. Some of the most common are below:
- Accidental content deletion – if someone accidentally deletes a file, a current backup will let you recover it
- New site updates – it’s always a good idea to make a fresh backup just before major site changes
- Malicious actions – if your site is hacked, having a clean backup can get your site running again
- Emergency restoration – hardware failure is a fact of life when dealing with servers. Having a current backup ensures your site gets online as soon as possible
How often should I backup my website?
At ExiaHost, we perform daily account backups stored on Amazon S3 on all of our plans to aid in the restoration of accounts in the event of catastrophic server failures. We highly recommend all of our customers store their own website backups locally as well. Ideally, a weekly or daily backup should be taken, especially if you make frequent updates to your site. At a bare minimum though, you should store a monthly backup of your account. Having your own copy can greatly assist in quickly restoring to a point in time, seeing how your site has evolved over time, or even just for archival purposes.
A common rule of thumb when dealing with backups is known as the “3-2-1” method:
- 3 copies of the backup
- 2 different locations
- 1 location must be remote
While no backup method is 100% fool-proof, following the above rule of thumb is a great way to help protect your site in the event of any number of problems.
ExiaHost can help!
We’re always ready to help out if you need assistance configuring your backups. Whether its just consulting on what solution works for you or building a Custom Backup plan with us, we’re here for you. Feel free to open a ticket with us or send us an email and we’d love to help your create a backup solution that works for you.