Protect Your Online Business

Don’t get caught off guard if your web hosting company goes out of business or your web server crashes. If you rely on your web site to bring you business, and especially if your business is primarily online, you need to make sure you have a backup of your site.

Five Reasons You Need a Backup

• Your web server crashes
• Your web hosting company’s data center experiences a disaster
• Your web hosting company goes out of business
• A hacker breaks into your web server and defaces your site or installs malicious code
• You accidentally delete critical data

Is Your Web Hosting Company Backing Up Your Data?

You should contact your hosting company and

• Ask if they are backing up your system
• Ask if they test their back ups to ensure they can be restored
• Ask if they are keeping their backups off-site to protect against disaster
• Ask what their service level agreement is for restoring your data. For example, if their site goes down, how long will it take them to recover the site?

Back Up Your Own Web Sites

Even if your hosting company says they’re backing up your site, if you want to be sure it’s being backed up, your best bet is to do it yourself. This way if your site goes down, the hosting company goes out of business, or you just decide you want to move your site to a different company, you’re prepared.

If you’re site is only made up of static HTML pages and images, you’ll just need to download those files using your favorite FTP utility. My personal favorite is Filezilla.

If, however, your site is a blog or an e-commerce site, your site probably uses a database. In this case, you’ll need to make a backup of the HTML files as noted above, and you’ll need to download a copy of the database.

To backup your database, you’ll need to log in to the administrative site your web hosting company provides. WordPress.org provides a very nice guide on how to backup and download your database.

What About Your Hosted Blogs?

If you’re hosting your blog at one of the free blog sites like WordPress.com, Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, or Yahoo360, you have no guarantee they will be backing up your site.

To be sure, your best bet is to keep a copy of each of your blog posts on your local hard drive. You can do that by writing your post on your computer and then copy/pasting it to your blog when ready. Or, you can write your post on your blog site and then visit your page and save it to your computer with File->Save Page As…

In addition, LiveJournal allows you to export all your LiveJournal entries and download them to your hard drive. Blogger offers instructions for backing up your Blogger blog, and WordPress provides utilities for you to export your blog so you can download your posts to your PC.

How Often Should You Back Up?

How often you back up your site really depends on how often your site is updated. It’s a matter of how much data you feel comfortable losing. For an active e-commerce site, you probably need a daily back up. However, for a personal blog, a monthly backup might be appropriate.

In my opinion, it’s always better to err on the side of backing up more frequently than you think you need.

While making a backup may seem tedious and time consuming, you’ll thank your lucky stars if you ever need to recover your site.

Do you back up your site?  What kind of site do you have and how often do you make your back ups?

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