Website backup: is my hosting backup enough?

By Graeme Preston, Founder & Owner · Published

Every hosting plan with us is backed up every day, so it's fair to ask whether you need anything more. For many small websites the answer is no. But there are a few situations where a second, independent backup is worth having, and this guide explains what they are.

What your hosting already includes

Every hosting plan with us is covered in two ways (see Backups and restore):

  • Our daily server backups. We back up the whole server every day and keep a week of copies off-site. If something goes badly wrong, we can restore your account from one of them.
  • Backups you make yourself, whenever you like, from your hosting panel, for example before a big change. You can restore these yourself, and download a copy to your own computer.

That covers the everyday accidents: a page deleted by mistake, a plugin update that breaks something, an edit you'd like to undo from yesterday.

Where a hosting backup runs out

Hosting backups are designed to get the server and your account back. They have some natural limits:

  • How far back you can go. Our server backups go back a week. If a problem has been sitting unnoticed for longer, for example hidden malicious code, the clean copy may already have gone.
  • Everything is in one place. Your website and its backups are with the same company. That's fine day to day, but some businesses, or their insurers, want a copy held independently.
  • Restoring isn't instant. Getting back one file from our server backups means asking us, and your own panel backups only exist if you remembered to make one.
  • They don't tell you anything has changed. They quietly keep copies; they don't warn you that files you didn't touch were changed overnight.

What Website Backup adds

Website Backup is a separate backup service for your website. It:

  • takes a daily, off-site, encrypted copy of your files and database, kept independently of your hosting;
  • keeps a long history of versions, limited by your storage rather than a fixed number of days;
  • lets you restore one file or the whole site in a few clicks, and test a restore on a temporary copy first;
  • emails you what changed each day, which can be the first sign of a hack; and
  • for WordPress, can update WordPress, plugins and themes automatically, taking a backup first and undoing an update that breaks the site.

Who it's worth it for

  • Online shops and booking sites, where orders and bookings change daily and losing a day costs real money.
  • WordPress sites with many plugins, where updates are the most common cause of breakage.
  • Sites that would be hard to rebuild: years of blog posts, a custom design, content nobody else has a copy of.
  • Businesses that need an independent copy for their own peace of mind, an insurer or a client contract.

A simple brochure site that rarely changes, and which you could rebuild from your own copies, is usually fine with the hosting backups alone.

If you decide to add it

If your website is hosted with us, add Website Backup to your hosting plan, so it's connected to your site and database for you; otherwise you'll need to enter the connection details yourself. See Adding a product to your hosting plan. Plans differ only in storage; our Website Backup page shows the current plans and prices. Start small: you can move up if you need more space.

Whatever you choose, it's worth testing a restore once, so you know it works before you need it.