Backing Up Your Website: Policies and Primer

Making sure you have a backup copy of your website is essential to guard against malicious online attacks or any other errors or problems that can corrupt your site. While many web hosting companies boast about free backups with their hosting plans, be sure to read the fine print as this is not always the case.

For example, Hostgator will back up your data. However, they will charge you a fee to restore it. iPage will restore your data for free, but you have to run the backup process yourself—I believe there is an option to have them do your backups, but there is an additional charge. Some hosting companies do indeed backup and restore for free. InMotion Hosting does run backups for you. And they will restore your data for free once every four months.

Of course you can always run your own backups. And in fact, this is the best way to ensure you have a backup copy readily available—and you don’t have to pay anything extra to do it. Having an off-site backup copy of your website is preferable anyway, so let’s take a look at how to run one.

Here’s how to easily generate a backup of all your website files, databases, and email configurations from cPanel. Locate the Backup Wizard icon in the files section and launch the program.

When the Backup Wizard starts, you can choose to do a full or partial backup.

Selecting a Full Backup will create a zipped archive of all your files.

You then specify the destination of your backup archive. You can also be notified automatically when the backup process has completed by entering an email address.

Once your backup has been created, you can download it to your computer via FTP or the File Manager.

Backing up your website is a must to guard against emergency problems or attacks. Always be sure to know your web hosting company’s backup and restore policies. And, for the best safeguard, be sure to do your own regular backups.