Even if your hosting company tells you that they will back up your website, create your own backups. Far too often I have seen a website infected with malware, or otherwise crash, only to find out the hosting company’s “backup” is not working properly and cannot be restored. This means you are screwed and you probably suffer from optimism bias.

Talk to your webmaster and make sure that you have a separate back-up and disaster recovery plan in place, even if your hosting company says they have one for your site.

If you use WordPress, this is fairly easy to set-up using tools like Backup Buddy, UpDraft, or VaultPress (my recommendation).

You backups should run weekly and should be stored OFF of your website hosting server. I use Amazon Web Services (AWS) or download them to my local computer.

Please, please, PLEASE do this.

Recommended Resources:

Backup Buddy plugin for WordPress from iThemes: https://ithemes.com/purchase/backupbuddy/

UpDraft Backup Plugin for WordPress: https://wordpress.org/plugins/updraftplus/

VaultPress for WordPress: https://vaultpress.com

Amazon Web Services (Cloud Storage): https://aws.amazon.com/

 

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