Website Backups Are Underrated
Most website owners are invest a considerable amount of time and money in developing their websites. The website is an important marketing tool for the business, helping them generate leads and orders. Usually the website has some interactive features and visitors can contact the business or reach out. Additionally, often times important visitor information is also stored on the website. Yet most website owners are not aware that their website can become inaccessible and sometimes unrecoverable at any time due to a number of reasons, making it necessary to ensure that daily website backups are available for website restoration including all of the critical data associated with the site.
Reasons For Website Data Loss
In the last decade, the level of cyber crime has increased greatly, and cyber criminals and hackers are always looking for vulnerable websites which they can hack and get control of. These hacked websites are then misused for hosting malware, spamming and other activities after changing the original content. Many of the website owners do not have a mechanism to automatically detect when a website is hacked, so they often times don’t detect the hacking until some time later. While the web hosting company will usually help their client regain access of the account, they will usually not be able to restore the website. Hence it is necessary to have a website backup process in place or risk needing to manually restore the website data which can be incredibly expensive.
Aside from malicious actors, sometimes web hosting itself fails. Though the data centers where the websites are usually hosted have multiple levels of redundancy, there are times when the hardware and software of the server will fail. It can sometimes take several days for the web hosting to be restored. If a website backup is available, it is easy to restore the website using the backup.
Additionally it is important to realize that due to the intense competition, it is not unheard of for a web hosting company to shut down without any prior notice to the customers causing websites to become inaccessible. In these cases, a complete website backup can easily be used to restore the website and migrate it to another web hosting provider.
Kinds of Website Backups
The kind of website backup depends to a large extent on the complexity of the business or individual website. For a static website, with only HTML files, taking a backup is relatively simple. On the other hand, for dynamic websites, with databases, the process of taking a backup is far more complicated, since the data is changing regularly. While it is comparatively simple to take backups of smaller databases, for larger databases, the process of taking these backups is both time consuming and tedious, since large files are generated. It is also important to ensure that the backups are kept secure so that they can be easily restored.
For eCommerce websites, the importance of ensuring that website backups are available is greater, since important customer information may also be stored in the website. Often times these websites are hosted using cloud hosting, the business may take backups of their website several times a day. If a website backup is available, restoring the website is usually a simple task for an experienced webmaster. While the actual restoration process may take some time, restoring the daily backup of the website, will ensure that visitors do not realize that the website web hosting has changed or that there was any problem with the web hosting.
Backups Can Save You A Hassle
No matter what size website you have, it is important to have daily website backups to minimize your downtime should you experience and unfortunate event. It is always better to be proactive about backing up your data rather than waiting until it is too late and be stuck with expensive and often times less than ideal solutions.
