Prime Admin Solutions

Many people self-host their blogs and build their websites around the WordPress platform. But what would happen if your web hosting company’s computers had a meltdown. Yes, they probably have back-ups, but how long would it take to get your website back up? I thought about this the other day when speaking to the company that hosts my primeadminsolutions.com domain. They are moving to a new cloud system and offered to move my account over to it (eventually they determined they couldn’t as it didn’t support Dot Net Nuke). I asked if the new system was so great, why not just migrate everyone and the answer was it would take a lot of time, it was easier to do a few thousand at a time. This concerned me as to how long it would take to get everyone back up and running if they had a serious meltdown.

Server meltdowns are not the only threat. Last year I knew one person who had their WordPress site hacked and her site was down for a while while she reinstalled and re-did the site. There was a rash of WordPress sites getting hacked around that time.

Another instance to backup your site is before you make any major changes to it. Upgrading to a new version of WordPress? Backup just in case. Accidents can happen. If you upgrade your WordPress and destroy your database in the process, you may incur charges from your hosting company to retrieve your data from their backups and reinstall.

The answer is to back up your own files. If you have a  C-Panel on your account with a backup utility, it’s easy. You just run the utility and you get a zip file that you can download to your computer to keep in your back pocket, just in case. If your web hosting company doesn’t have a one click backup utility, simply copy all of your files (or zip and download if the option exists) to a directory on your hard drive. If you are using WordPress please remember to copy over your database too.

Below is a video that shows how to back up your WordPress database from within WordPress by using a plug in. I haven’t used this yet, so I can’t advise how effective it is, but it would be worth a try. I plan to install it and run it but I am also going to use the backup program on my C-Panel, just to be on the safe side.

An ounce of prevention is a very good thing.