Please tell me you’re backing up your website nightly!
I always cringe when I see a customer come in and ask for support knowing they don’t have a backup of their website!
Backups are critical to any website, regardless if it’s a small blog or a large eCommerce giant.
At Name Hero, we provide one night’s backup as a courtesy to our customers, that can easily be accessed through cPanel.
But this should not be your only backup plan!
Manual Backups
Inside of cPanel you can easily download a full backup of your website (and hosting account) by going to cPanel -> Backup -> Download a Full Website Backup.
You can then download it to your computer or send it to a remote FTP server for safe keeping:
Depending on how often you update your website should determine how often you do this. For most websites, once a month or once a week is plenty.
You should always have at least one backup on your local computer at all times.
Auto Backups
There are a number of different vendors that offer automatic backup apps for your website such as DropMySite. They’ll automatically backup your website nightly and allow you to point-and-click restore it.
If you’re using a popular Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress, it would make sense to use someone like ManageWP who provides 1 monthly backup free of charge:
There are also plugins such as BackupBuddy, but please don’t store these the same place as your WordPress. That just opens you up to a number of different security risks and makes my inner nerd want to facepalm.
Incremental Backups
If you don’t need a full backup, but just one database or so, you can easily download these inside of cPanel -> Backup then click on the database you need.
This is especially helpful when you’re wanting to update your WordPress or WHMCS installation. Number one mistake people make when updating software, is failing to take a backup of the current state incase of a failure!
Name Hero Backups
As I noted above, we remotely backup your entire cPanel account each night (even Reseller accounts, as long as it’s not over 100K inodes) and allow you to access the data from cPanel -> Backup Administration:
As you can see, this will most likely be the only “backup” tool you need.
With a couple of clicks you can restore an entire domain, database, email, your home directory, or an individual file or directory.
These are taken once each night, with one day retention, and sent to a secured third party location.
While this is extremely convenient it still shouldn’t be an excuse not to keep a local copy yourself! You can never be too careful!
Backing up your website is essential as a number of things could happen. Going without a backup would be like not having an insurance policy on your home – an accident could turn tragic!
Ryan Gray is the founder and CEO of NameHero, one of the fastest growing independent web hosts in the United States. Ryan has been working online since 1998 and has over two-decades experience in Internet Entrepreneurship.
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