The Importance of Doing Backups

1651 days ago

You will be surprised to know that a lot of webmasters don’t do backups on  regular basis. Well, I myself once did not believe in backups. Okay, the truth is that I was too lazy to do backup and I trusted that my webhost will do backups for me. Hey, that’s what they claim anyway. I need to tell you, that most of these claims are false. In fact, a lot of webhosts don’t even do weekly backups! They tell you that they have daily backups in whatever redundant system and what other nonsense but they usually don’t do it. It takes up too much resources on their server for them to do backups on all their accounts, especially if you are on a shared hosting plan. And just think of the space they need to store those backups.

And even if a webhost do have backups, they may charge you an amount to help you restore your files and database. And lazy webhosts may take a long time to restore your website, all the while you are losing visitors and customers. If your website is a directory, then you will lose even more than just visitors. All the submissions will be lost as well and you will pissed off those customers who have paid for their listings. In the web directory market, trust is everything and if your customers think that you are conning them, then you will not last long in this industry.

You may think that it will never happen to you, but that’s what I had thought too. I thought I was too small and insignificant for hackers to target. Well, nowadays hackers do server-wide hacking, which means that the entire server is compromised. My website was hacked due to someone else’s crappy excuse for a script. And all my files and database was damaged. And my webhost didn’t have any backups. I had to get one that was several weeks old from my own backup. This meant that since my site is a forum, all the posts and new members were lost. I had received a lot of complains from irate members who had to re-register or had to post new topics again. But that was a lesson well learned. I do backups everyday now and immediately after I did something significant. You should too.

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