We’ve already discussed why the cheap hosting is a waste of time for a serious website and the benefits of proper monitoring and capacity issues. The obviously point which was left out of the last post was backups.

We all know we should backup our data. We know it makes sense. We know it will save us a lot of time and worry. Yet most of us fail to make the effort to set it up. Or we manage to set it up but actually testing it is a bit of a step too far.

And so there we are, head in hands as the hard drive holding all of your vital work, all client records, everything dies slowly in front of your eyes helpless to save it.

While there are various solutions to backing up your office data, often the data stored on your website is forgotten or whoever set it up “presumed it was backed up”. This doesn’t quite cut it. You want to make sure that if the building where your website is hosted suffers some horrible attack and your server is destroyed that you can carry on. That within hours your site can be back online. Back serving your clients and generating revenue.

Cheap hosting companies will sometimes claim they provide backups of your website but it is likely to be a week old and take them several days to find it down the back of the server cabinet.

There is another side to website backups and that is restoring your site after is has been attacked directly. It should never happen and the best sites are built to withstand almost every attack but it is still possible that an attacker finds a new way to get into your server and delete or change all of your website and importantly the data it contains.

Having one backup from yesterday isn’t going to help if it was attacked two days ago and no one noticed until this morning. That’s it, data lost. Website gone. Clients waving as they walk to your rivals – maybe a bit of an exaggeration but it would certainly damage your reputation.

Data isn’t just a valuable part of your website – it IS the value in your website. Do you want to take any risks?

At juicy not only do we employ at least daily backups of all our sites (some have continuous backups) but the data is copied offsite to another security facility well out of the way. We keep sequential backups as well reaching back a month so we can restore the site to any of those days. What is more important is that we regularly check the backups to confirm they are working correctly and if needed, we could restore any site. It’s not enough to believe it will work – you have to know it will.