“We don’t have backups” – The last thing you want to hear from your host

When you are in a bind to find missing website files, the last thing you want to hear from your hosting provider is “Sorry, we don’t have backups of XYZ.”

At Winhost, we do have a backup system in place to backup our customer’s website files and databases nightly. However, this backup system is intended for disaster recovery. We can pull files out of the backup system but this should not be your only backup source.

There have been times when I’ve had customers ask for certain files from our backups, and for one reason or another we didn’t have them because…

1. The files requested were from too long ago.
2. The files being sought were mistakenly thought to exist in the website and were not there.
3. The customer didn’t touch their website for a while and during that time the site got compromised due to a vulnerability and the files requested were no longer there or had been overwritten/altered.
4. On rare occasions, we have experienced backup system failures which made retrieving the files impossible.

In short, there are many different reasons a hosting provider may not have specific backups.

Be Prepared!

First off, if you haven’t already, download your website to your own computer. If you have any questions about downloading your website files or databases, let us know and we can help. You may want to get on a schedule to download your site every so often. For extra safety, you can copy the files to an external harddrive.

When you are making changes to your site, it’s always best to make the changes on your own computer and then upload the modified files to the webserver. This way you should have the latest copy. Keep in mind that making changes directly on the server may be convenient, but your local copy will be out of sync.

For those that prefer an automated solution for backups over manual methods, we launched our SiteBackup Service.

SiteBackup Service

If you want to make sure your website files and databases are being backed up – nightly, weekly or what ever your heart desires – then our SiteBackup service is a great way of automatically backing up your website and databases. And to protect you further, the backups are not located in the Winhost data center – they are on the Amazon cloud.

In addition, you get a separate control panel for your backups and the backup control panel is located outside of Winhost data center as well.

We have instructions in our knowledge base on how to configure SiteBackup. But if you want our support department to help you set up the SiteBackup service, just let us know after you order. We’ll help you set it up for you.

What type of options does SiteBackup have?

Below is a screenshot of the SiteBackup configuration options.

Some of the things you can configure are:

• Specify the directories you want to backup
• Type of files you want to exclude
• Set retention period – anywhere between 3-30 days worth of backups
• Backup frequency
• Time of day and time zone you wish to start the backup

You can backup your MS SQL databases and MySQL database too.

How do I restore my site from my backups?

For your site files there is an option to simply restore within the SiteBackup service.

As well as an option to download the site files in zip format.

So the SiteBackup solution is a convenient way to take charge of your site backups. You can sign up for the SiteBackup service through your control panel. If you need help setting it up, just contact our support department. We can help set it up for you.

Visit Winhost to learn more about our SiteBackup solution