Website Backups

Website backups go hand in had with security. They are security for a disaster or if you website gets hacked. You should make regular backups of your website. This applies not only to websites, but blogs, Joomla and Mediawiki sites.

Most hosting companies do not do backups for you. They backup the server installation, but leave you on your own for your blog. The better hosting companies will do periodic backups of your websites. If anyone know hosting companies that do or don’t provide backups please add them in the comments. I am talking about the basic hosting services that many bloggers and simple websites use. Siteground does weekly backups, while Hostmonster, Dreamhost, and Cyberwurx do not.

To do a backup, you usually have 2 options with most hosting company control panels. These 2 methods are as follows:

1. Full backup of your entire site
   • Includes your website, database and home directory this to your local computer
   • Backup locally on the hosting server and then download when backups for your database and your website
     • Run this after you add plugins, themes, images, podcasts, videos or other files on your website
     • Backup your database on a more regular basis

My recommendations for backups would be to do a full backup after you have your website completely setup and then again once a quarter. I would then recommend doing a website only backup monthly unless you make many changes to your website on a regular basis. This does not count frequent posting updates. I would then do the website backup at least weekly or whenever a large number of changes are made. Lastly, I would recommend backup up the database at least weekly. If you post multiple times a day you may want to make backups daily or find a service that does it for you.

To make these backups faster, more reliable, and quickly accessible, allow the backups to run locally on the hosting server. When it is complete, download them to you local computer.

Tag: hostmonster