Glossary › Hosting › Backup
Backup
A backup is a complete or partial copy of your website’s data—files, databases, settings—stored separately from your live environment. Backups act as a safety net, allowing you to restore your site after events like data corruption, accidental deletion, hacking, or server failure.
Why? What's going to happen?
Nothing hopefully. But that's too optimistic of a view for businesses. Imagine this scenario.
"One e-commerce store lost 3 days of orders due to a corrupted database—and their last backup was a week old. Daily automated backups could’ve prevented $10k in lost sales."
Backups aren’t just technical hygiene—they’re business insurance.
How often should I run backups?
This is completely dependent on what kind of website you're running.
A simple informational site with no user registration? Monthly backups and on changes would be totally sufficient.
Users can register and post content? Daily is a good idea.
An active ecommerce site? At least once a day. Multiple times a day would be preferable.
Don’t Trust Your Host Alone
Just because a hosting company says they provide backups doesn’t mean those backups are reliable. In many cases, they aren’t performed frequently, they aren’t stored offsite, users can’t access them directly, and worst of all—they might not even be restorable when you actually need them.