Every week, 140,000 hard drives crash in the United States. What happens when one of those hard drives that crashes is the one your website is located on?
If you have a plan in place, you probably know the answer; but if you don’t have a backup strategy in place, you will be faced with the daunting task of having to rebuild your online identity while operating without a website. For most businesses downtime like this is not a possibility, because any downtime dramatically effects bottom lines and missing opportunities.
Hopefully you have daily, weekly or monthly backups of your website as well as any databases that it uses, If you haven’t developed a plan, RIGHT NOW is the time to create a backup strategy that your business can use to effectively secure itself and its online real estate.
The “right” backup plan will change depending on your hosting environment, your website platform and many other factors. Most of our clients are on a WordPress, so we will examine a good starting point for backing content up off of a WordPress.
When you login to the dashboard of your WordPress, you will notice on the left hand navigation bar, a tab that says “Tools”.
Click on ‘Tools’ and go to ‘Export’. This is where you can decide which parts of your WordPress you would like to backup and export, you will be able to backup all the Pages and Posts from your WordPress, but not all of your files. Select what you want to backup, click on “Download Export File” and you will download an XML file that has all of your sites information.
This will download all of the content from your site which can be very useful , but you may also need to download other backups as well.
Other aspects of your site you might want to consider backing beyond its core file structure, are any themes or templates your website uses, plug ins, modules, and things of that nature, and for many sites, a database. These files and databases are all used to make up your website and should not be ignored in your backup plan.
Managed hosting can take away many of the headaches of backing up websites, by having someone else be responsible for the backups and restoring of your hosting environment.
Contact us today to see if managed hosting is right for you. We will give you a fair and honest assessment of your hosting needs now and looking into the future.