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Should You Buy A Special Backup Plan For Your Website?

The few people I know who own a website are pretty casual about their backup strategies. I don’t blame them – unlike us who live and breathe in the industry, most individuals have other stuff to do in their life, and don’t spend time thinking about “best practices” or “worst-case scenarios”.

Nevertheless, if you or a client of yours has a website, it’s vital that you think about a backup plan. The reason is simple – one day your site is going to crash. There are no “ifs” or “buts” about it. No matter how great your hosting, no matter what precautions you take, you will wake up one morning and find your site doesn’t work. The reasons could be many, and there’s no point in even trying to predict why. Suffice to say that there is a long, fat tail of problems, and it’s only a matter of time before something happens to you.

Website Backup is Insurance

Most of us have thought at some time or the other that the insurance premiums we pay for our health, or our vehicles are useless. After all, we barely even use the services for which we spend money every month.

But the thing with insurance is that when you finally need it, you thank your stars that you had the foresight to buy it. There are some events that can completely decimate your life or your assets, and insurance is a hedge against that. Losing your website is one such event. Years (or decades) worth of work, content, and reputation on the line, along with income.

If that isn’t worth insuring, I don’t know what is.

In-Built Backups: Are they Sufficient?

Most web hosts are aware of this and offer some form of backup to their users. They too are aware of the tremendous damage to their reputation if one of their customers loses their website due to an unforeseen event. So they typically have a bare-bones backup system in place. However, the implementation varies widely.

A10 Website D & H Daily Backups by Default

A10 WDH offers a free nightly backup of all your data, subject to a limit of 20 GB per account. Backups are kept for a single day, and then discarded. The reason is simple – there’s a storage and performance cost to data and maintaining multiple backups for thousands of accounts is not only expensive, it also slows things down for everyone.

Obviously while this provides some protection, it’s nowhere near enough. If a backup occurs immediately after a crash, you’re out of luck, and restoring it won’t do anything. Also, it’s good practice to maintain backups at a different location from where your site is located.

To address these issues, A10 WDH offers integration with DropMySite.

A10 WDH’s DropMySite Integration Solves the Backup Problem

DropMySite is a service dedicated to backups and restoration. A10 WDH conveniently integrates with it so that users can access backups directly from cPanel. In addition, A10 WDH allows you to purchase plans from DropMySite starting at just 5GB instead of the 10GB minimum if you order directly from DropMySite. For just $1.99/m, you can schedule up to 30 backups and restore them with a single click directly from within cPanel.

Outsourcing the backup system to a professional service is, in my opinion, the best option simply because you want to keep the stored data away from your own infrastructure in case something goes wrong at your end.

Comparing to Other Services Like Jetpack

As a point of comparison, Jetpack’s Backup service starts from $3/m – more expensive than with DropMySite. So the rates offered by A10 WDH are extremely competitive, and I think a very worthwhile investment. In addition, DropMySite specializes in backup, and I like handing over work to those who specialize in it (like LastPass and passwords for example). Given the cheap rates and security it provides, A10 WDH’s DropMySite integration is the best of all worlds!

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