Website Backups
There are two options available for safe guarding your website from disaster! Please read the options below and call 0845 643 0978 if you have any questions
Automated Backup System
It is your responsibility to ensure you have backed up your website data and databases. You can do this using the tools provided within CPanel, but if you prefer we can automated the backups on a daily basis. For £10 per month we will backup your website, database(s) and hold offline copies for security.In the event of a disaster, we can restore your website, databases, email and settings.
Manual Back-Up
We provide tools with every hosting account, to take a full back-up or partial back-up. The instructions below explain how you can do this.
1. Log into your cPanel area (http://yourdomainnamehere.com/cpanel)
*You will need to log in using your username and password (same as FTP generally). If you have forgotten this, you can log into your billing area and access cPanel via the My Services page.
As shown inside the red ring above, click on 'Backup Wizard' to begin the process
2. Choose Backup or Restore
Once inside the backup wizard, you will see two options as per the screen shot provided below
Simply click Backup to extract a copy of your website, data, email settings etc as shown above and follow the instructions. To restore, use the restore option. In this case, please click the Backup > button.
3. Choose Backup Option
Now, you will have the option whether to create a full backup or a partial one, selecting the options which suit you best. Please refer to the screen shot below.
Either select a full backup as shown above, or choose to backup specific parts of your hosting account as shown above.
4. Choose destination for the backup file
If you choose 'Home Directory' this will make a backup of your website and place a single file into your FTP directory which you can download after the backup is completed. MAKE SURE you delete the backup AFTER you have downloaded it to your local computer, otherwise it will use up valuable webspace and can affect your web quota.
If you have an external hosting account with FTP access and you are sure you have enough quota, you can choose one of the FTP options provided. To do this, simply enter the remote host, username, password and directory.
If you have SSH access to your third party server, you can benefit from high speed SCP transfers, but ensure you have the SSH account enabled and consider that your third party server may need to white list our IP address in order to accept the incoming transfer. To identify your IP, run a ping command in your operating system e.g ping www.mydomain.com to identify the IP address allocated to your hosting account on our server.
5. Frequency of Backups
If you have a static website or even CMS website with content that does not change much, you can probably afford to make irregular backups as and when your site changes. If on the other hand, you have an active e-commerce website or regularly changing CMS website, it is important to take more regular backups. Often, structure does not change and only data does so consider taking a full website backup inititially and from then on, taking smaller MySQL and E-Mail backups which are quicker to process.
6. Time to Process Backups
Obviously, the most popular time of day is working hours as most clients on our servers are business customers, so please ensure your backups are done evenings / weekends. This is not to say that you can not take a backup at any point of the day, as you can, but please understand the process can slow your website down and this is best avoided during peak use times.