Imagine you woke up this morning and your website was gone. Like literally gone. Disappeared. Vanished into thin air. POOF! Flatlined. Yes, that can actually happen. How? Well, there are a ton of reasons… your web hosting company went belly-up or they got hacked or somebody just pressed the wrong button… who knows. In any case, you need to back that thing up! Ahem… your website, that is.
Contrary to popular belief, it is NOT your hosting company’s responsibility to create and maintain a backup copy of your website, it’s YOURS. Some hosting companies do backup sites for their own protection but rarely make the copies available to their clients so it’s best that you do it yourself for your own peace of mind.
Here are a few tips for your backup plan…
Choose the Right Backup Method: There are many different ways to backup your site. It’s best to choose a method that works for your budget and schedule
- Manual backups in which you download your website to a file on your computer.
- Panel-based backups where you use your website’s control panel to save your files.
- Cloud backups allow you to save to services like Amazon S3 or Dropbox and you can access your files from any computer.
- Special backup software and/or automated solutions that you can pay for to have the ease of scheduled backups.
Determine a Backup Schedule: Whether it’s once a day or once a week, the idea is to backup as often as your website changes…or more. It’s better to be safe than sorry.
Check Up On Your Backups: This is a step that is often forgotten. You may think that if you are backing up your site, that’s all you need to do. Every once in a while, it’s good to check your files just to be sure they are all there and there is no corrupt data or any weirdness going on. You just never know.
With a good backup plan you can ensure that if anything ever goes wrong, your site will return to its full, uninterrupted glory in a matter of minutes.
What’s your backup plan? Let us know how you are maintaining the safety of your website!
