Why bother with back-ups?
Even though having your website hacked might seem like a crazy scene from a sci-fi movie, it is a more common phenomenon than one might think. Earlier this year statistics showed that 4441 sites were hacked in just one month (February) in South Africa. Only the United States and Indonesia had higher incidents of cyber-crime during that period. Apart from this threat there are many other reasons why an unprotected website could be in danger. As mentioned, getting hacked is an unfortunate reality, accidents happen, computers can crash or updates can go wrong. Any of these can destroy all the hard work you’ve invested in your site.
We all have extra copies of important documents at home and we make backups of important files on our computer, but the same should go for a website. Having regular website back-ups is essentially like a great insurance plan for the website owner, as well as the service provider of course. Being able to access the most recent back-up available can help to easily get your website up and running again, with all your data, latest updates, blog articles and other changes in place.
Types of back-ups
There are two types of back-ups specifically for websites: local (on-site) and remote (off-site) back-ups.
On-site back-ups refer to the temporary storage of data on a local device, such as a hard-drive or on a server where your current website is being hosted.
The advantages of local/on-site back-ups are:
- they are easy to use/install
- less expensive and
- easily accessible (as the data is available locally).
The disadvantage of on-site back-ups is that:
- should any physical damage be done to your premises (theft, accidents, fire etc.) or the server crashes, the data could be affected and lost.
Off-site back-ups mean that the data is stored on an off-site server, which can be accessed via the internet.
The advantages of off-site/remote back-ups are:
- Your data can be accessed from anywhere, provided you have an internet connection.
- In a cloud based back-up system there are also multiple copies of your data. So if one stops working, your content can be retrieved from another back-up.
- Your data will be safe in the case of an event at your premises and your content will also be more protected because it is encrypted before being sent to the remote server.
- Lastly, cloud based back-up systems have ample storage capacity available, so you will not run out of space for your data.
The only disadvantages would be:
- that there is a higher cost involved and
- accessing your remote back-up might take more time than getting to the on-site back-up.
accessing your remote back-up might take more time than getting to the on-site back-up.
Our Services
Recognising website back-ups as a vital safety net, we consider this an essential service for all our clients and provide the following:
For Starter / Standard / Business Hosting plans: weekly local back-ups hosted on our servers.
For Business Care Plans: in addition to weekly local back-ups we also do a weekly off-site back-up in the cloud.
Back-ups are retained for 30 days, meaning the last 4 back-ups created are always available at a time.
If you would like to upgrade your hosting plan to the Business Care Plan for increased security please contact us.