This is a great day. You just launched your brand new website. It is on one of the newest servers provided by your hosting company. It is fast, beautiful, works great, and your customers simply love it.

Fast forward weeks or months from now. A client calls you to let you know that there is some odd video, image or text on your homepage. You realized your website has been hacked. It is horrible, the pages you spent hours building are just gone and the hacker left behind malicious malware. It is a matter of time before Google or other major search engines find out and tag your site as being unsafe and infected.

Panic takes over the office. Someone figures out how to take the homepage down before more damage is made. Now your staff looks at each other and ask: “Does anyone have a back up of the website and database?”

Sadly, in many cases, the answer is no and the site owner is left with no website and with no backup of code, text or images.

=1= Creating complete backups:

If your website is hosted on a server with a cPanel, you can create automatic backups (using CRON) of the site (aka the HTML structure) as well as the database (where the data is stored). These backups are zipped and saved on your server. You can do daily, weekly or monthly backups. For most sites, a monthly backup is sufficient unless you make changes frequently. Simply ask your webmaster to schedule these backups for you. If your site is not on a cPanel server, consider moving it to a newer hosting plan within your hosting company. It is worth the effort.

=2= What to do with the backups:

Recently SiteLock, one of the leading companies in website security, started to recommend that you do not leave these backups on your server.  Instead they recommend you download them onto your local hard drive and delete them from the server. If you log into your hosting account, look for the hosting section and access the cPanel dashboard. There look for the section titled “Backups”, find the latest backup completed and download it onto your PC. Then delete the copy on the cPanel.

We recommend that, if you decide to handle the download of backups yourself, to make sure you subscribe to a PC backup plan like CrashPlan or Carbonite which backs up your entire PC onto the Cloud. That way if your PC crashes or is stolen, you can go to your Cloud based backup and retrieve all of your files.

=2= Not doing it right:

Some site owners are technically advanced and feel they can handle the set up and saving of backups for their site on their own. At Business Website Center, we recommend you hire someone to do it for you so that it is done well. The fee should range between $50 and $100 per month. Think of it as an insurance policy for your website.

Again imagine what would happen if you did not have a fresh copy of your website and the thousands of dollars it would cost and the amount of time it would take to rebuild the site to what it was before the hacker did the damage.

Your website is an important part of your business and should be protected as much as possible. Having full backups of your site (AND the database … do not forget to backup the database!) gives you the piece of mind you deserve.

Call us at (707) 794-9999 (California Time!) or Email us today for additional information about our website backup services.