Should You Buy Backup Storage From NameHero?

When you sign up for NameHero hosting, you can purchase additional backup space during the checkout process as shown here:

You can use this additional backup space to store up to 30 days of backups on NameHero and restore them to any point in time. But which plan should you get, and how much backup space do you need?

NameHero Already Has Free Backups

NameHero is one of the few web hosts that provide backups for free on all hosting plans – even the cheapest one. By default, there are two backups always in place:

• The latest daily backup
• The latest weekly backup

There are two technical limitations – the system will only backup your account if it’s less than 20 GB and has less than 100,000 iNodes (files and folders). In addition, these backups are stored offsite, so there’s no danger that a network-wide outage will impact them.

Limitations of NameHero’s Free Backups

The most obvious limitation of NameHero’s free backups is of course that you might need to access a backup between now and one week ago. The latest NameHero daily backup replaces the older one. So if the most recent backup is too close to the live version of your site, then restoring that backup doesn’t make much sense. The only option you have is to restore the weekly one. This means all the work you’ve done on your website over potentially the last seven days.

In other words, it might not be enough. The NameHero free backups are great as insurance against a catastrophic loss of your site. But it’s not so great if you want to quickly revert to an earlier version. To plug this loophole you should purchase additional backup space.

NameHero’s Paid Backup System Saves your Site for 30-Days

In addition to purchasing extra backup space, the NameHero backup system stores versions of your site for 30-days. This means that you can revert back to any time during the past month. So even if you find out that your site was hacked a couple of weeks back, you can still go back in time before that happened, and restore not just your entire site, but specific files and folders too.

In fact, you probably don’t want to restore your entire site to a point in time two weeks back and lose all the work you’ve done since then. With NameHero paid backups, you’re completely covered.

Incremental Backups Save Space

The cheapest NameHero paid backup storage plan starts at 5 GB. Normally, that wouldn’t be close to enough space to store 30-days worth of backups. Considering that an average site takes up anywhere between 500 MB to 1 GB space, not counting the database, you’ll need a lot more than 5 GB for a month’s worth of backups.

Fortunately, we don’t need to store entire copies of backups each time. NameHero stores incremental backups, meaning that only those files and folders that change are updated. With incremental backups, each additional backup uses very little additional storage, and in this way, it easily covers 30-days of backups. You can still restore your files to any point in time in the past 30-days.

Additional Backups Bring Peace of Mind

You never realize the true value of backups until something happens when you need to restore a copy. Your site might run smoothly for years without you needing to restore it. But eventually, when something goes wrong, your insurance policy of backups pays off. And that’s the best way to think about backups – insurance. If your entire business depends on your website, then paying the extra few dollars a month for backups is totally worth the peace of mind. It can save your business from destruction.