I often get questions and sometimes hear horror stories.
What are backups?  Do I need them and how do I do them?

This is probably one of the most important topics related to hosting from both a provider and customer perspective.

What are backups?  A backup is a full copy of all your site files, databases, email, etc.  It’s a way to restore your information in case there’s an event that causes you to lose data such as your site being hacked, webhost unavailability, catastrophic datacenter events, etc.

What’s the Risk?  I’ve had many customers sign up for Charlottezweb because they have lost their sites or spent incredible amounts of time in trying to recover them for multiple reasons due to their previous providers or issues such as hacking.

-If your site is compromised/hacked, a backup that’s clean allows us to restore it quickly and troubleshoot what happened.
-If you update the site and something goes wrong, it allows us to restore to a functional version of the site.
-If our datacenter were to face a natural disaster (for example), you would have a copy of your site that we could move.
-There are more examples, but you likely get the point. 🙂

Isn’t my host responsible for this?   Fantastic question!  This varies by hosts and the “rule of thumb” is that a site owner/webmaster should always backup their own data frequently in the event of one of the unplanned issues above.

Any time you plan to update any part of your site, you should ALWAYS backup before and after your upgrade.
Additionally, you should plan to backup your site regularly as best practice.  Depending on how often your site changes, every 2-3 weeks may be a good timeframe.

That being said…

What does Charlottezweb offer?

Charlottezweb runs backups on the following schedule:

-Daily backups both locally and off-server
-Weekly local backups
-Bi-weekly backups off-server

This is another reason why our hosting pricing is higher than some of our competitors – For your paid disk quota, we store about 4x that amount in backups in case of emergency.

Please note, backups are not 100% guaranteed.  I’d say that 99%+ of the time they work perfectly but I have had a few cases over the years where a customer needed a backup and the file was corrupt.  This is the reason it’s an important idea for all of us to download our sites before/after changes and frequently to ensure we’re covered in the event of an emergency.  Charlottezweb backups are an added benefit and not meant to replace the responsibility of customers/webmasters running their own individual backups.

I hope this was helpful — If you have any questions, please contact us.

Cheers,
Jason