While most website owners probably never think much why you should backup your website. Tale the example of having a tyre puncture miles from home, then you know the relief that comes with finding your spare wheel is in good condition, if you have one, modern cars often have a puncture kit instead, but you get the gist of it…
Website backups are your emergency service. Working in the background and you may never need them, but when you do its because something bad has happened.
What can go wrong on a website that requires a backup? Here are a few examples of the kind of things that might give you problems.
1. Guard Against Human Error
Mistakes happen. You forget to save or you save by mistake after accidentally deleting something. you might have a power cut in the middle of saving your changes. An untrained user might try things they do not understand. And so on…
2. Reverse Problems During Updates
Typically the websites of today run on a platform of software and databases. These will need updates to keep them secure and up to date. The vast majority of the time this goes without a hitch, but not always. Worse case your whole site is down and offline.
3. Prevent Loss of Data
You may have customer and order data stores within your website. Maybe you have a set of technical documents. You may have collected information via forms. Website run on hardware, hardware can fail. In a recent fire a whole datacentre was destroyed taking several huge website offline, as well as thousands of small business and personal site. Not all had a backup.
4. Handle Compatibility Issues After New Installations
Adding new features to your website is usually a good upgrade to keep your site fresh and interesting to visitors. What if that upgrade is not compatible with other software running on the website already?
5. Resolve Malware Infections and Hackers
Looking after numerous websites I see that every day there are multiple attempts to access them in order to take control or install some nasty software. If you use Maumbury Design to host your website be assured that I have multiple layers of security to prevent malicious access. If the worse does happen, you need to have a backup you can use that was taken from before the attack so that a rebuild off the site does not re-infect the system again.
7. Make It Easy to Create a Testing Version of Your Website
It is good practice to use a staging site (a working copy of your live website) when making changes to your website. Hosting with Maumbury Design you get this built into our systems from day 1. If not you may have to build a copy manually and one way to do it is by using a backup and restoring it onto a different domain/server. This way you can try out changes without risking the live website until you are satisfied everything is compatible and working.
8. Backup your website backup
A backup is just data, and data can get corrupted. If that happens you might only find out when you try and restore your backup only to find it will not work. So a multi-layered backup system will give you the best protection, and storing the backups in different places keeps them safer. Maumbury Design uses a minimum of 3 backup layers stored in 2 different locations. This can be increased for critical systems.
Is my website backed up?
The good news is that most hosts offer some kind of automated backup. Some solutions are better than others and some offer 7 day backups others 30 or 90 day.
Other than that if you run WordPress you will find a number of really reliable backup solutions available, just search for plugins in the add-ons directory and choose one that has a large installed base.
If you would like to discuss how best to backup your current website or what website management plans with inclusive backups are available please contact me at Maumbury Design.