Backups: the insurance you hope never to use

Ask a small business owner if their website is backed up and the most common answer is "I think so?" The second most common is "the hosting company does that, doesn't it?"

Sometimes it does. Sometimes the backups exist but are stored on the same server as the site, so a hardware failure takes both. Sometimes they're a paid add-on that was never switched on. Most people find out which on the day something goes wrong.

What can go wrong

Websites break in surprisingly ordinary ways:

• A plugin update conflicts with your theme and the site goes blank.
• Someone on the team deletes a page they thought was unused.
• A weak password lets an attacker in, and they deface the site or insert spam.
• A server fails, as all hardware eventually does.

In every case, a recent backup turns a crisis into a minor annoyance.

What good backups look like

A sensible backup routine has three qualities:

1. Frequent. Daily is right for most small business sites. If you update the site several times a day, you may want more.
2. Off-site. Stored in a different location from the server, so one failure can't destroy both.
3. Tested. A backup you've never restored is a hope, not a plan.

How we handle it

Every site we host is backed up daily to separate storage, and we keep 30 days of copies. That means if something went wrong last Tuesday and nobody noticed until today, we can still roll back to before it happened.

Restoring is our job, not yours. You call or email, tell us roughly when the site last looked right, and we take it from there.