Why do you need to Backup your Website?

Ever wonder what will happen if your website is hacked or deleted, sure you may have a backup copy on your computer from the very first day when your site built; but is it the same website? If you are running a blog, online store or a business website your website will have additional content and information added regularly, you need to make sure that you can restore your website in case of disaster without losing information.

How long will it take you to reconfigure an offline copy? and is it acceptable for your business? Losing online presence means losing customers and potential revenue. Most business owners have this assumption that the hosting provider will back up my website on a regular basis, in most cases, it’s not true. Most hosting providers especially on shared hosting platform only keep less than one week worth of backup, and usually the only backup once a day, some cheaper hosting provider doesn’t back up at all to keep their cost low.

What does this mean for your business?

There are three important aspects of backups:

  • Recover Point Objective (RPO)
  • Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
  • Backup Retention

For fast and competitive online world, you want to make sure the backup intervals are not more than few hours apart, and for the RTO the time should be in minutes not hours.

Recover Point Objective (RPO)

f your hosting provider backup the data once a day, it means you have 24 hours gap between each RPO, if the backup runs 1 am each night and your website is compromised at 10 pm then all the customer’s enquiries, online orders since 1 am onward are lost. It may be OK for a website with no traffic or activity but if you are selling online and engaging customers you may want to reduce this to a couple of hours.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

Let’s look at the RTO, if your website is compromised 10 am and it takes your hosting provider to restore the site hours, you are losing money and customers. Not to mention the representational damage, who would want to buy from a website that gets hacked. In the fast competitive world, your backup system should be able to restore within minutes not hours.

Backup History (Retention)

Backup retention, I came across a number of businesses who were not able to restore the recent version of their website. Let’s say your website was compromised on Thursday and you only notice a week later, as I said before most shared hosting provider doesn’t offer more than 3 days of backup history. The limitation of backup systems is that it can not detect a good copy of the website from the bad, which mean if the backup systems only keep three copies on the fourth day all your backup copies will contain the compromised versions of the website, resulting in complete loss of website and its data. We strongly advise you to keep at least 30 days of backup history.

How much a Website Backup Cost?

There are decent hosting providers offering a reasonable hosting with a proper backup system for less than hundred dollars a year, depending on your hosting requirement you may have to pay bit more. But it surely worth investing such a small amount to ensure your website is available and recoverable in a timely manner instead of saving few dollars.

For no obligation website continuity & disaster recovery plan contact us.

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