If there is one point I can’t stress enough, it’s Backup your website! I know you have probably heard this before, but have you heard the horror stories? Recently, I have come across a number of scenarios where my clients have found themselves in a world of hurt. Luckily, none of my clients completely lost their sites, but then a two-year-old copy isn’t always as good a save as you would think. Here are a couple of examples to emphasize the need to back up your website!
Hosting Company Shuts down site:
Recently one of my clients missed an email from their hosting company stating that their credit card information needed to be updated. Unlike most companies, this company didn’t provide a grace period. End result; no website. My client then contacted them , and contacted them, and contacted them to no avail. With no recent copy of their website and a company that didn’t want to respond (so that we could pay them to activate the site and get the files back), we were forced to relocate to a new server. Of course, since it was my client, I did have copies of her website. The problem is that I hadn’t done any work for her in nearly 2 years and my copies were out of date.
Hosting Company restored an old copy of a website, erasing the Current Version
A few weeks ago, I had a client call me because their website wasn’t coming up. I took a look and found that all of the pages had been converted to 0KB files (If your not a propeller head, this means that all the website’s files were replaced with blanks). I called the hosting company and told them to restore the site, two weeks later the site still hadn’t been restored, so I called again. This time I told them to restore a copy a few months old. The hosting company responded with a short impersonal message stating they couldn’t restore the site. Again I ended up placing a two-year-old site online, in order to get my client back up and running.
I think the point is simple, backup your website. You wouldn’t buy a brand new car and not insure it, so what possible excuse can someone have for not backing up their own website. If you want to take the chance go ahead and leave it up to fate, but it could be a costly mistake.
Share Your Two Cents