What Happens When You Forget to Backup your Website and Email?

Imagine this.

You have a cool website that attracts huge volume of traffic each month.

Your business is doing great and it’s growing more than you could ever imagine. Then one day, due to some unforeseen circumstances, your website’s gone and your customers have no choice but to look elsewhere.

This scenario might sound crazy but it can happen whether we like it or not. It’s no longer a question of will it happen but when. What’s even more painful is when you don’t have a website backup in place. All the time, effort and money you spent are gone along with it.

So, there’s no better time to start a backup plan than TODAY. As a website owner, backing up your website should be a regular habit you need to have. It might be time-consuming but it’s better to always have a backup copy in case something goes wrong.

This article will delve deeper into why you should do a backup. Make sure to bookmark and share this with your team so they, too would understand the importance of backing up.

Why Do You Need to Backup your Website?

Website hackers

There’s no telling when the next data breach will be released. We’d like to think that our website is small enough to even be bothered with but hackers don’t care about the size of a website at all. Their goal is to steal sensitive information like credit card numbers or simply to just cause trouble.

If you’re using WordPress, your chances of getting hacked could be higher since it’s one of the most widely used online publishing platform. It’s a favorite target among spammers and hackers. Even with a security plugin installed, with no proper maintenance and setup, there’s still a risk that a malicious script might inject a virus or malware to your website.

If they do hack and disable your website, you can try to use a full backup copy to restore it to its last workable copy.

Not all web hosting companies offer free daily backup

Believe it or not, some web hosting service providers don’t offer backup feature to their customers. Here at Vodien, we’re happy to say that we offer free weekly or daily backup to our customers. They can use it to roll back their website to its latest working version in the case that the website isn’t working.

While the regular backup feature from any web host does offer a huge safety net, it’s too risky to depend entirely on them as your only backup solution.

We recommend that you have a secondary backup solution, one that is not stored on the same location as your web host’s servers. You can save a copy on your personal hard drive or better yet, a cloud backup solution. In this way, you have another copy ready if in case your hosting company’s shared servers experience outages.

Faulty Updates

Content Management Systems such as WordPress usually rolls out regular updates every now and then. This is to patch up any security loopholes found and provide users with the latest version of their software. We highly recommend you do a backup before updating any component on your website (plugins, themes, software, etc).

Most of the time, security updates are successful but there might be instances when they don’t go as planned. Any update that goes wrong might take your website offline.

Malwares and Viruses

You might unknowingly inject your websites and emails with viruses and malwares through a third-party plugin or theme. It’s important to read reviews and ratings from other users and check if the plugin has been updated regularly. Of course, a having a backup does not prevent malware attack but it will give you peace of mind when needed.

Human Error

Mistakes do happen even by the most tech savvy website owners. Anyone might erroneously delete or overwrite wrong files or folders. Just a simple command can cause data to update incorrectly. Whatever that mistake is, you’ll be glad that you have a backup ready when such uncertainties occur.

Server Outages

No web host ever can guarantee 100% reliability and uptime no matter how hyped up they seem to be. There might be days when datacenters can experience downtimes or outages from time to time due to network failure or hard drive errors.

It’s awesome when your web host has the capacity to retrieve their data. However, these retrieved data might be on a version that’s already a few days old. You might lose a few days worth of work, should your web host’s servers go down. So, always be prepared for the worst.

How to Implement a Website Backup

Now that you understood why it’s important to backup your website files, let’s go and perform one. Here are the different ways:

• Talk to your web host if they offer free website backup service

          For Vodien customers, we offer free JetBackup service for all web hosting and business web hosting plans. JetBackup offers full backups for accounts, files, databases, emails, and many more.

• Check your control panel

See if you have a free backup wizard tool to create a backup manually. Check if you have the option for full or partial backup for your home directory, MySQL databases, and email forwarders and filters.

• Backup plugin

For those on WordPress, there’s a few good choices for you. Check if it the plugin is updated to its latest version and if it has great reviews from other users. Some of these backup plugins allow you to schedule backups and send it automatically to a cloud storage such as Google Drive.

• Save on Computer

Aside from doing any of the three methods mentioned above, a good rule of thumb is to save a secondary copy to your computer folder or removable storage drive (USB drive). We wrote a similar article on how to save your important files here: The Best Way to Backup your Important Data

Don’t Leave it to Chance

Be in control of your website. Data breaches and outages may happen at anytime so it’s a must to perform a backup everyday for your peace of mind. Back up your site today and avoid the stress and anxiety that goes with losing your website files and having to start all over again.

If you’re an existing Vodien customer, we are more than happy to discuss how our JetBackup Restoration service can complement your backup strategy. Simply click on the link below and our SuperSupport will guide on how to get started.