Why You or a Third Party Service Should Manage Your Website Backups

This  is a warning to everyone who owns a WordPress website or any website in general that, if you’re not taking backups yourself, and/or having a service to do it for you then you are at risk of losing your website data.

In a recent article, a hosting supplier, a gentleman who runs a small-company in the UK,  has accidentally deleted over 1,500 of his client websites and all their backups. You can imagine that he’s in for a bit of a rough ride for however long it takes for legal proceedings to take place.

The point is, is that there is a lesson to be learned from this accident, and this article is to educate you on what you need to do to stop this, or avoid this from happening to you. I’m not saying that all hosting companies are going to delete your website overnight, or in a brisk fatal, code error move. Larger hosting companies would have systems in place to stop this from happening, but nevertheless this is a learning opportunity.

Something that you might not know is that the company that you are hosting with  eg GoDaddy, Hostgator, any sort of any hosting really if you read their service level agreements they will state that you should not rely on their backups and that it’s pretty much squarely falls on your shoulders as the website owner, the data holder. They do take backups but you can’t rely on them so it’s really important that know what to do to protect your data.

So what do you do? There is two options.

The first option is you can learn how to take backups of your website. If you are using WordPress then there are plugins like BackupBuddy, UpdraftPlus and BackWPup . There’s several plugins that will do backups for you, and also you are able to setup scheduled backup so you can just set them for a daily or weekly schedule depending on how active you are on the site. I suggest to set your backup schedule for a minimum weekly backup. So you can learn how to do it yourself using a plugin … Bottom line, is to have a backup and make sure to store it offserver.

The other option is you can enlist the services of WPGeni where we we will look after your site for you. We look after all the plugin updates, making sure that everything is up-to-date, which will decrease the likelihood getting hacking. We also do a few other things but most importantly we do the backups for you. Our backups go to an offsite server, our own, which is trusted, safe and quite reputable.

We also have another another place that we place our backups as well just in case that fails as well. We have systems in place to handle that, and also if your site does go down then we we put it back up. We will also recommend either staying on your existing hosting provider and help to migrate to a new server if there are ongoing issues.

You can use other services as well. You don’t have to use WPGeni but I just implore that you need to think seriously about this, you certainly don’t want to lose your website or hard work. If you are earning an income from your website then you certainly should have these measures in place to protect yourself and your data.

We are available if you have any questions please ask and we are happy to help and happy to serve.

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