6 Bona Fide Benefits Of Regular Hosting Backups

Too often, regular hosting backups are often seen as an expense line; despite many benefits. It’s only when your website disappears or you are left with no way to recoup customer data that the core benefits of regular hosting backups are realised.

For almost all businesses, your website is the backbone of your digital success.

Seldom do we search for services on traditional media and therefore, with your website out of action, your service to existing and potential new customers is compromised. In order to keep your site secure and protected, you’ll want to know how to back up your website in a systematic way.

Through our hosting partners, DigitalOcean, AWS & Linode, we now offer a new service offering enterprise backups every hour with a rollback period of 30 days. As a digital marketing agency that maintains hundreds of websites, this kind of service guarantees the ability to back up clients’ websites and restore lost data if anything goes wrong.

And believe us, things can go wrong!

Benefits Of Regular Hosting Backups

If you’re struggling to convince your directors that website hosting is not an expense worth skimping out upon, here’s 6 key benefits why regular hosting backups are absolutely vital for your business… and your sanity!

1. Quickly resolve malware injections.

No matter how secure your website is, websites occasionally will get hacked – even the Pentagon has been hacked before. According to statistics posted by TechJury, 64% of companies across the globe have fallen victim to at least one type of cyber attack.

In particular, due to the open-source nature of WordPress (and the fact that millions of businesses use this CMS), WordPress websites are particularly susceptible to hacking. If you are running a business that does not actively update your website, pinpointing when and how your website was compromised is near impossible; without managed hosting backups.

Not only do frequent hosting backups enable IT staff the ability to compare differences between the uncompromised version and compromised version of your website (which enables them to quickly find what went wrong) it will also save you thousands of dollars through reduced downtime with the ability to roll back instantly.

With hourly backups, you will have 720 different restore points over the course of a month so if something does go wrong your last restoration point is only ever 59 minutes ago.

2. Test Website Changes With Minimal Disruption.

Conversely, for any business that does make regular website changes, you will know all too well that sometimes developers get things wrong too! Website changes should really take place within a staging environment to ensure that your live website is unaffected during updates. However, this isn’t always feasible for businesses on super-cheap hosting packages.

When changes are made to a live website, a whole sea of issues can arise. From stopping a customer from checking out to breaking the styling of your design, live website tweaks are just a no-go full stop.

That said, when there is no other option than for you to make changes to your live website, hourly backups will once again prove to be an incredible contingency plan.

3. Reverse Unexpected Problems

Websites are ongoing projects that constantly need maintenance and updates. In particular, WordPress websites rely upon third-party plugins to drive core functionality. Each one of these plugins will require updating at some stage.

Whilst WordPress offer a fantastic product, with the majority of plugins remaining free of cost, sometimes, plugins can go rogue or conflict with other plugins on your website. Each plugin is developed by a third-party that does not speak to one another. Therefore, plugin conflicts are extremely common in WordPress.

From a single line of code to outdated plugins, there are many reasons why your website might experience weird outages. Regardless of the reason to mitigate your loss in downtime, regular backups (at best case hourly backups) will ensure that each change can quickly be rolled back should something go amiss.

It’s a complete insurance policy for the protection of your single greatest business asset no matter whether your team is at fault, or something a little nastier.

4. Mitigate Data Loss

Mainly applicable to e-commerce stores, websites can produce a lot of data and sales in a short space of time. With first-party data becoming increasingly important, sites cannot afford to lose days and weeks of data if a site goes down or a database becomes corrupt.

Luckily for agencies, hourly backups are an easy solution to the problem. If a website does go down and you can restore to the previous backup and all your work will be there waiting for you. Not to mention sales orders if you are managing your entire eCommerce business directly from your website.

5. Make Web Hosting Migrations Easier

Last but not least, website migrations usually happen every few years for one reason or another. Whether an aesthetical overhaul or a platform change, SEO migrations are important to maintain a domain’s SEO visibility online.

You should always create a full backup of the system before performing a migration. A backup gives you another layer of protection you can use in the event something completely unexpected happens during the migration.

6. When Catastrophe Strikes, You’re Safe

Data Centres are not perfect and, with an alarming frequency, they tend to burn down or suffer other catastrophic failures. Heck, Silicon Valley (and many West coast datacentres) are built directly on a techtonic plate one of the most earthquake prone regions of the planet – it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

If natural events do take place, your backups are never taken to the same datacentre – in fact they will be transfered to offsite datacentres across the US and Europe that are in safer locations. So, if the worst event possible actually happens, you will have easy access your site, less than an hour before the computer housing it burnt to the ground. You can then quickly restore it to another location in a matter of minutes.

At Digital Next our WordPress hosting services come with hourly hosting backups so your in safe hands.