Websites are no longer just something beautiful for a business to have, they are an essential business tool, yet in surveys, it was found that over 40% of companies don’t ensure that their website is safely backed up just in case the unimaginable happens like it being hacked, broken or even deleted.
At HITS, we pride ourselves on giving our clients the very best industry-leading features and technology available. In short, we have no worries about backups and loss of data, so neither should our clients.
Why are backup’s important?
It’s not always your host’s responsibility to back up your website.
Many web hosting companies won’t offer backups as part of their standard hosting packages and will often require you to pay extra for this support. As such, if you don’t get this support from your hosting company and don’t back up the website yourself, should something happens to your site, your provider might not be able to help you restore the files. If you are unsure if your hosting comes with website backups, contact your hosting provider to check the terms of your contract with them.
Server Failure
A server is just a computer, and like all computers, there is a chance that it could get a virus or have a hard drive failure causing it to lose data.
Protection from hackers
While some hackers aim to steal personal information such as credit card details, others do it to prove that they can and cause inconvenience for the person that has been hacked. Ensuring you have a backup of your website means that should this happen to your website, you can quickly restore it and get your site back up and running.
Update Failure
If you have a Content Managed Website such as WordPress, you might have noticed that when you’re asked to perform a security update, it tells you to create a backup before running the update. This is because websites have multiple files and components that make them work and store data. Should anything go wrong with just one of these during the update, then your entire site could be taken offline?
Peace of Mind
While there are many technical reasons behind backing up a website, it will also leave you safe in the knowledge that no matter what happens to your website, you can react quickly to any issues and get it back up.
Backup Solutions
On Server Backups
Backing up your website onto your server is the quickest and secure solution to creating regular automated backups of your website. There is, however, one massive downfall to doing this, the backups are stored on the same server as your website. So while they can be an excellent method to restore your site, should it get hacked or update fails should the server fail in any way, then you will lose your website and your site backups.
Manual Backups
Backing up your site manually is the most low-tech method of backing up your website, although you could use it in combination with on-server backups to ensure that you have an off-server version of your site to hand should you require one. The biggest downfall of this method is that it isn’t automated, so you need to remember to do the backup. Plus, if your website is big and you have capped bandwidth usage, it can take some time to download the site and cost you in bandwidth.
Cloud Backups
Using a cloud-based solution such as Amazon S3 or Dropbox is our pick when backing up websites. This method of backing up files is automated and stored in a separate location from the webserver. Also, as the storage size is flexible, it can be increased as your website grows, meaning you only pay for the space you need for your backup.
How Can HITS Help?
All of our HITS websites are hosted on state of the art Google Cloud Platform servers worldwide. Being paranoid about backups has always been one of our most significant assets. Therefore, we have developed a technology where we capture daily backups (generated overnight) and store them for 90 days. We also utilise a powerful live revision system meaning whenever a change is made on one of our websites, an undoable revision is auto-created.
We could restore any backup of our client’s servers within minutes if ever required. However, this is extremely rare due to our advanced monitoring software keeping an eye on all of our client’s sites.
