News stories of major website crashes have become a near daily occurrence. The financial effects are catastrophic. Companies lose consumer trust, lose revenue during the outage, and still have to pay to get the site live again. Backup all the files, applications, and scripts that comprise your company’s website is critical.
Top Reasons Your Website and Applications Need a Backup
Hacking Risks
Website hacking has become commonplace. As hackers grow more sophisticated in their techniques, so should the security measures your company employs. Backing up your website and applications creates one more additional barrier between a hacker and your sensitive data. If a hacker does get in, a full backup means your team still has the original code. They can add security fixes without rebuilding the entire site from scratch.
Rogue Software Updates
Speaking of hackers, updating all applications and software on a website is widely suggested as a hacking prevention strategy. These updates can occasionally go rogue, though, and cause real damage to your site’s structure and performance. Your website is made up of multiple components — plugins, software, backend programming, and themes. If an update to any one of them goes wrong, it can send your whole site crashing down.
Human and Computer Errors
Regardless of how experienced your staff is, humans are prone to error. People make mistakes. When it comes to your website’s performance, an employee error can send your site offline for days. Deleting a vital file or uninstalling the wrong application is often all it takes for an employee to crash your site by accident. The same goes for your computer system. Computers are not fool proof and can crash, get lost, or stolen. Backing up your site and all applications prevents this from becoming a catastrophe — pairing regular backups with a tested disaster recovery plan closes the gap that human error opens.
How To Backup Your Website and Applications – A Guide:
Contact Your Hosting Platform
Ask what website backup services they provide.
Contact Your Programmer
Ask what backup services they are capable of providing. As the creator of your site, your developer already has the knowledge needed to manually back up every part of your website and its applications.
Research Backup Services
There are a number of backup services available to businesses. Some are more cost-effective than others, but each one adds a layer of security to your site and is worth the investment. When choosing a backup service provider, ask what they provide and how they notify you of outages, and try their interface before you buy so you know it’s easy to use. For a deeper framework, see NIST’s contingency planning guidance.
Use ZIP Files for Small Businesses
Small businesses are often able to compress their site into a ZIP file and simply email the file to themselves. This only works for small sized companies that are not expecting to expand in the next five years.
Save All Files Locally
This should be common sense but far too many businesses have websites without backed up files. Save a copy of all files on your computer. This shouldn’t be your only backup strategy, since having more than one copy of your files is a simple, low-cost way to add extra protection.
Contact your hosting platform and ask what backup measures they use. Then add your own strategies on top, so you can recover files, applications, and content quickly after an outage.
Ready to See How Volico Data Center Can Help You?
Got questions? Want to talk specifics? That’s what we’re here for.
Have one of our friendly experts contact you to begin the conversation. Discover how Volico can help you with your Managed Backup needs.
• Call: (305) 735-8098
• Chat with a member of our team to discuss which solution best fits your needs.
