Backups: What We Keep, What You Should Keep Print

Read this part first

We keep a server-level backup, held off-server, taken weekly. It exists for one purpose: so that a server can be rebuilt if the whole thing fails. It is disaster recovery for our infrastructure.

It is not an account-level restore service. Restoring from it means restoring an entire server, which affects every account on it, so it is not something we can reach into to recover your deleted file, your site as it looked last Tuesday, or a clean copy from before you were hacked. Those are exactly the situations most people imagine backups are for, and for those you need your own.

We would rather tell you this plainly now than have you discover it on the day it matters.

So take your own. Here are four ways.

1. cPanel full backup, free and complete

Built into your hosting, and the only option here that captures everything in one go: your website files, your databases, and your email accounts with their mail.

1. Log in to cPanel at yourdomain.tld/cpanel.
2. Find Backup using the search box at the top, as described in our cPanel tour.
3. Choose Download a Full Account Backup and generate it. You will be emailed when it is ready.
4. Download the file to your own computer.
5. Then delete it from the server.

That last step matters. The backup is created as a compressed file inside your account, and it counts against your plan's disk space like anything else. Leave a few of them lying around and you will solve a backup problem by creating a disk space problem, which our article on full mailboxes describes the unpleasant end of.

The catch with this method is that it is manual, and manual means it happens when you remember. Which is usually not often enough.

2. CodeGuard, automatic and hands-off

Our CodeGuard service takes daily snapshots of your site automatically and stores them offsite on Amazon's storage platform, encrypted. Restores are yours to run, one click, either a single file or the whole site, with the option to stage a restore and check it before committing.

It also watches for changes: it alerts you by email when your site's files change unexpectedly, which is often the earliest warning that something has been compromised, and it can keep WordPress and its plugins updated with automatic recovery if an update breaks something. Databases are included, and according to the service, mail is captured as part of your site's files.

This is the option we recommend to anyone whose website matters commercially, for the simple reason that it happens whether you remember it or not.

3. SpamExperts archiving, for email specifically

If your email is the part you cannot afford to lose, and for many businesses it is, SpamExperts offers archiving alongside its spam filtering. It preserves every inbound and outbound message, compressed and encrypted, independently of your mailbox.

Its real strength is compliance and recovery over the long term: finding a message from three years ago, responding to an audit, or producing correspondence for a legal matter. It ships with a set amount of storage which can be extended, and it is sold per domain rather than per mailbox.

4. WordPress plugins

If you run WordPress, there are well-established backup plugins that handle both your files and your database, many with scheduling and offsite storage built in. They work well, and they are a reasonable choice if you would rather manage backups from inside WordPress than anywhere else. Whichever you pick, make sure it stores copies somewhere other than your hosting account, a backup sitting next to the thing it is backing up protects you from very little.

What we can restore for you

If you have a cPanel backup file of your own, we will restore it for you at a fixed once-off rate. Send it through and the restore is typically done within about an hour of us receiving it. Open a support ticket to arrange it.

Note what that means in practice: our ability to help you recover depends entirely on you having a backup. Which brings us back to the top of this article.

Good to know

The moments people wish they had a backup are predictable, and they are all avoidable: before a plugin or theme update, before a developer starts work, before a migration, and before any change you are not completely sure about. A backup taken five minutes before is worth more than any backup schedule, and it costs you nothing but the five minutes.

If you are not sure which of the options above suits your setup, ask us. Telling us what your site does and how much of it you could bear to lose is enough for us to point you at the right one.