Thread: Do you backup your website?

Backups are an important part of a hosting package. Many providers does not know the importance of this until a disaster erupts. Backups have been proven to be important after a few web hosting providers are forced to close shop after a disaster happened and they do not have any backups of their server.

So does your hosting provider has backups of their server? Do they have daily of weekly backups? Are the backups offsite or onsite? Are you able to retrieve the backups or are they only for disaster recovery purposes (by the hosting provider)?

For us we do daily backups to an offsite location and we allow our customers to request one free restore per month. However, customers are encouraged to make their own backups as well.

You should always keep a latest backup copy of your website as anything may happen at anytime. Your provider may not have the backups needed by you or they may not even have any backup system in place. Although some provider has promised to backup your site everyday or even every hour, you still need to have your own backups as well for the safe side.

I'm I wrong to assume most web hosting company do the backup for you? I think my host does.

Yes most web hosting companies does backups of their server. However, a large part of them will state that the backups are only for their own use (eg. disaster recovery purposes) and are not available to users.

Besides that, there is always a risk of you being suspended by the hosting provider, possibly due to too much resource usage or any other terms of service violation. If that really happens, the hosting provider will not provide any backups for you.

According to my experience and after hearing many stories about this in forums as well as from clients, the conclusion that I can make is to always have backups of your site even though your provider promised to backup your site for you. ;)

I really don't back up my website, I have never had any problem that warrant that a site needs to be re-uploaded, I do back up databases though, for example I do a dump of this site databased but I do not back up the files that actually make up the site itself.

Regarding hosting company doing back up for their own use, I will not trust Fasthosts with my data, about 7-8 years go, the lost significant data and they did not have a back up, every since I never use or recommend them.

Yes databases needs to be backed up as well. ;)

i think the database of the web host is the good back up for the site....

In Hungary the level of the service is different from British providers. We usually don't have cpanels so when we want something to arrange we need to correspondance and get response sooner, but rather lather. When I modify something around the database I always execute a database export, because I had some accident in the past and getting the database restored by the hosting provider cost a lot of money if the problem was my fault. Regarding the files, I create backup annually, but they usually disappear as me hdd broke down and similar things happen :-)

Well, it must be horrible if you do not have any control panels to manage your hosting services. You should request with your hosting provider so that they will introduce this in the future.

It is better to do a backup of your site from time to time and not to depend on the hosting company backup.

I do backups from time to time even if there are backups made by hosting provider