Whenever we buy web hosting for our website, website backup is a thing that we must have to look at. A secure website backup plan can help businesses save time, save money, protect from hackers, and security from data loss.
In this ever-evolving technology world, we can see hackers become more advanced, the expectations become higher, and things are required to be more secure. Rather than protection, backup is the best option for every small and large business.
Let’s understand website backup in depth
Why is Website Backup Important?
My friend is a web developer. Whenever he designs a new website page, he makes sure to take a backup of the website every day. Because while creating a web page, he deletes many sections and writes many codes, sometimes the code does not work properly and sometimes he deletes the entire page.
Another reason for website backup is to protect data from worst-case scenarios like hardware failures, software glitches, and malicious cyber attacks.
Whenever we install third-party software on our server, we do not know what the result of it.
So, a website backup can facilitate smoother website updates and overhauls that help in data protection during critical events.
For WordPress, backups become more important when your website is on the WordPress CMS platform. WordPress is an open-source platform that requires installation of the plugins, themes, and third-party tools.
As per Sophos Whitepaper (April 2021), Website backup is the #1 method for any website to get their data back after a cyberattack (ransomware).
What is website backup?
Website backup is a process of storing a duplicate file of your website info, media, theme, code, and other elements. The backup data is stored in a safe place to protect it from potential loss and damage.
The hosting platform offers automatic backup for your website. The frequency of backup files depends on your needs. You can select the frequency of website backup including daily or weekly.
If a website regularly updates its content daily then it may go with daily backups.
Components include in Website Backup
Before building a secure website backup plan, you have to be aware of its workings and components included. A website backup data files are stored as a zipped file using the tar format.
The components include in it,
Website Files: A backup contains all your website data in different folders including code files, media, content, plugins, themes, third-party software, etc.
Databases: If your website relies on a database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL then the data backup will stored within it.
Email Sending: Email forwarders and filters play a role in managing the path of emails sent from your website.
Tips to Secure Website Backup Plan
Building a secure website backup plan is an essential practice to protect your data and streamline your operation. Let’s understand
1. Choosing the Right Backup Frequency
The frequency of your website backup depends on the traffic you get, the data you put on the website, and the type of your website.
If you run a website like e-commerce, banking, news, or online software that frequently updates lots of information daily, requires high backup frequency.
When you run a website with low traffic and less sensitive content then you can go for weekly backups.
Whatever backup frequency you choose, it is important to store it with proper security.
2. Choose a Third Party Backup Solution
Getting a backup solution from a third party can be an impressive decision for your secure website backup plan with ease. But when you select a backup service provider, it is important to think about some important points.
- Pick a storage option that fulfills all your current and future storage capacity in your budget.
- They should offer an automatic backup option with unlimited one-click backups.
- Look for their security features including encryption, storage security, secure access controls, regular monitoring, and regular security audits.
- Their platform should be user-friendly for storage, restoration, uploading, deleting, and managing backups.
- Customer support is important to get a resolution to any issue you face or arises in it.
- Also, if you running on WordPress check their other solutions with their service.
3. Backup Plugins For WordPress Site
For WordPress websites, plugins can provide additional backup security solutions to your website. These plugins are quite helpful in storing your website data that you can restore without visiting your hosting’s control panel.
You just have to create an account on the plugin, set up your requirements, and start taking backups of files.
Some trusted plugins like UpdraftPlus, Solid Backups, VaultPress, Duplicator, BackWPup, etc.
All of these plugins are easy to use, affordable, secure, and come with auto backups.
4. Maintain Offsite Backups
Maintaining your backup on your server and WordPress platform is known as an on-site backup. Onsite backups offer backup storage options on devices such as hard drives, NAS devices, or servers. Onsite backups can be attacked by hackers and face any unforeseen circumstances.
But when selecting to maintain your backups offsite at a distant location that means your backup is more secure.
Here, your website backup files are stored at a remote data center or in the cloud.
Offsite backups provide an extra layer of security to your data. Restoring data from offsite backups may take longer time due to network. These backup files are more resilient and secure than onsite backups.
Offsite backup is important to implement your 3-2-1 backup strategy.
Also, you can use a hybrid approach by taking backup on both onsite and offsite as a secure Website backup plan.
5. Test Your Backups:
Testing is quite important to ensure a secure website backup. Testing of backup helps to check the working of your backup files.
This testing will not just provide data only about backup creation but also be successfully used to restore your data and customization of it.
There are many testing software available to test your backup. You can use cloud-based backup services that offer a user-friendly interface to check the integrity of your backups.
Some services go a step further, they provide automated testing features that alert you to any identified issues. Also, you can ensure the security of data files on a particular platform.
This is not necessary to test your backup files regularly. You can do it quarterly, half-yearly, and annual basis.
6. Is Hosting Backup Services Enough
Only relying on hosting providers for secure website backup is enough in most scenarios. However, it is important to explore different backup solutions for your website.
Because hosting provider companies offer lots of backup benefits with some of the drawbacks.
If we see the pros of hosting backup services, then they are like
- Offer an automatic backup option every week and in some cases daily basis.
- You can access your backup files to customize, delete, upload, and restore them whenever you want.
- They have a seamless integration service.
- Provide 24/7 customer support for migration, database access, and backup-related issues.
But there are some drawbacks we can see related to hosting a backup service.
- Any time the server may face a single point of failure.
- Also, you have limited control over the server and backups.
- In case your storage capacity is fulfilled then there are high costs required to buy additional storage.
7. Manual Backups
Take your backups whenever you want. Taking manual backups helps in many situations like transferring a website, wanting to install something, customizing your code files, and testing something on it.
You can store your manual backups on various things like a secondary hard drive, USB, or a cloud storage service.
In manual backups, you have the option to select what files to choose, what is important, what to upload, and which ones to delete.
This type of backup only works in a certain condition and make sure do not to go for hosting that not offer an auto backup option.
8. Encrypt Your Backups:
Data encryption is important to protect your backup file from hackers. Backup file encryption helps to encrypt your data third party and shows only to authorized parties.
This becomes more important when you transfer data from one to another place. This adds a layer of security to your backup files.
9. Monitor Your Backups:
Continuous monitoring of backup files helps to identify any issue instantly. Let’s say your storage capacity is fulfilled and you do not have any other plan to store your backups.
Monitoring of backups provides an instant notification of this.
Many third-party services provide daily notifications related to content change. This email notification includes what was added, modified, or deleted with a timestamp.
10. Implement a Disaster Recovery Plan
Having a disaster recovery plan is important to build a secure website backup plan. We can’t predict unforeseen events such as server failures, cyberattacks, or accidental data loss in an online world.
A disaster recovery plan helps to swiftly recover and restore your website to its optimal state.
Disaster recovery requires a strong understanding of technical knowledge. For disaster recovery, you can contact our server team at any time.
Secure Website Backup Service With Servepoet
As a business owner, if you are looking for a comprehensive website backup things then you choose CodeGuard Backup service. This is a third-party platform that offers everything you require for your secure website backup plan.
CodeGuard backup service includes many benefits like
- Automated daily website backup will stored securely on the cloud
- Offer robust encryption with AES 256-bit techniques
- Website backup installation is extremely simple with the use of SFTP and MySQL
- Restore, upload, delete, and manage your website backup securely
- 30-days money back guarantee
You can learn more about Codeguard Backup Service. Understand different plans and services available to protect your website from any issue.
Our server experts also provide 24/7 support related to backup, server, and website security whenever you want.
Conclusion
Building a secure Website backup plan is a lot more important than creating a website. If something wrong happens with your website then the backup is the only cost-effective solution for you. Here, we have discussed lots of things that all help in securing your website backup. These tips include regular backups, testing them, monitoring them, and implementing a disaster recovery plan.
You can get CodeGuard backup service to ensure the comprehensive security of your website backup files and database.
What More? ServerPoet offers Top-notch Managed Web Hosting services at an affordable cost that no one can deny. With cost, you can enjoy 99.9% uptime, faster server response time(<0.1sec), and 24/7 technical support.
Frequently Asked Question
There are many reliable backup tools or services available to take secure website backups. You can schedule regular backups to ensure you capture the latest data and settings. Make sure to store all of your backups securely either on the cloud or an external server.
The 3-2-1 backup rule advises having 3 copies of your data, stored on 2 different types of media, with 1 copy kept offsite. This strategy will provide redundancy, protection against hardware failures, and safeguard data in case of disasters or cyber threats.
Incremental backups are typically the fastest. They only save changes made since the last backup, reducing storage and time requirements. However, the speed also depends on factors like the size of the data and the backup solution used.
A good backup schedule depends on the frequency of changes to your website. For higher traffic and regular content updates websites require daily backups, while static sites may require less frequent backups. However, you have to regularly review and adjust the schedule based on your website’s update frequency and criticality of data.
Mirror backup is a secure website backup plan that creates a replica of your data. It duplicates files and folders while ensuring an identical copy. This method provides complete data redundancy that may require more storage space compared to other backup methods. Using mirror backups when having an exact copy is crucial for recovery.
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