It’s important you don’t get complacent with your website hosting company and rely on them 100% for your backups. While there are plenty of great hosting companies out there that perform solid backups for their customers, you need to ensure you take a few important steps on your own to prevent catastrophic loss of your website.

There are a number of different things that could go wrong, some could be fault of your hosting company, or some could be an unfortunate sequence of events that are not the fault of your hosting company (such as your site getting hacked). There are a few steps I’ll go over in this article on how you can help mitigate the risk of loss of your website.

A tragic example of where backups play a huge part is the hacking of Distribute.IT and their complete loss of customer data as a result of being hacked. In this case your own backups could have meant you could get your site back up and running. While Distribute.IT could have definitely done something differently in terms of their backups, end users should always take their own backups to prevent against worst case scenarios.

What Could Go Wrong? (Risks)

Hacked Website:
There are a huge number of websites hacked on a daily basis, usually due to running out of date CMS software on the site. This may impact you if your site gets hacked, and you don’t know it’s been hacked. Your web hosts  backup process may take a backup of the hacked version of your site before you realise it’s hacked. This means their backups are up to date and working, but your site may still be destroyed.

Corruption of Website:
Your website may get corrupted through being hacked, or simply due to an error taking place while updating your site. If this error goes undetected, your web hosting company may end up legitimately taking a backup of the corrupted file.

Web Host Doesn’t Have Backups:
Your web host may not backups, and you could lose your site if you don’t have your own backup in the event that your site is hacked or they have a failure of their hosting service. Not all hosting companies take backups, and if they don’t you run a high risk of data loss in the event they have a hardware or software failure which results in data loss.

Backup’s Don’t Work/Are Corrupt:
Even if your host backs up your site for you, there is a chance the backup is corrupt, missing portions, or simply doesn’t work. Your hosting company doesn’t know what is on your site, or how your site work – so it’s not feasible to make 100% certain your site works when it is restored – because they don’t know how to test it 100%.

Old Backup:
If you make changes to your site, and your web host hasn’t done a backup in the time frame and your site gets hacked, or they have a failure they could have an old copy of your site. This is especially dangerous if you run a website which has a database and a lot of daily transactions going through the database.

How To Prevent Data Loss?

Don’t take any chances with your data and make sure you follow these 4 easy steps to ensure you don’t become a statistic. 60% of businesses who suffer data loss will down within 6 months of the data loss.

Select A Reputable Hosting Company Which Does Backups:
Make sure you select a reputable hosting company with a good reputation, and history of data recovery. Selecting a hosting company with high uptime does not necessarily mean you will have a high level of data integrity, see if you can see how they have handled events when hardware has failed. Did they have backups? Could they restore from their backups? Did they keep their customers informed during the process?

Keep Your Own Backups!
If your web host uses cPanel, Plesk, or another major control panel – taking a backup is as easy as a few clicks. Find out how you can take your own backups, and backup your website to your local PC on a regular basis. Your schedule should be more frequent if your site is updated often, or you have a database which changes regularly.

Use Online Backup Service:
There are several online backup services such as https://www.siteautobackup.com/ which allow you to easily backup your cPanel based website. These don’t cost much, and could save you a lot of money down the track.

Check Your Backups Work:
Check your backups regularly, backups can easily be corrupted, missing parts, or just simply not work. Just because you have a file on your local PC, or use an online backup service – it doesn’t mean your data is 100% safe. Make sure you regularly attempt a restoration of your backups.