by Jan Pascal

You are a proud owner of a popular website. Since your site has many visitors you have selected a good, well known and respected web hosting company. Your pages load quickly, from advertising you are getting a stable income, visitors come from search engines and links at various places. You are a happy webmaster until the website is for some reason down. The website is hosted on a server. This is a computer with some increased throughput and reliability. But it is a physical machine which can fail. And web servers do fail.

Because every machine can fail, hosting companies advertise their up-time which is typically 99.9%. This means that on average a maximum of 8 hours per year you can expect some malfunction or inaccessible website. In general this is not a big deal. Any respectable hosting provider will be back online in a very short time. If your site is up and running after the offline period, you only loose some visitors during the time when the website was down. However, if there was a problem with the disk drive where the website files are stored, then you might have a problem. Some files might be missing or corrupted.

Every hosting company uses reliable servers with RAID disk arrays but there is no guarantee that this equipment will not fail. The hosting company performs regular backups of the files and databases and this is probably done on a daily or weekly basis. If you have recently updated your website with some new content then you might expect that after the problem has been solved, your latest configuration and database will not be restored. You will lose some files or latest updates stored in the database. Sometimes it might also happen that your website will be hacked by some evil hackers. They might change only the homepage, but they can also delete your files.

Therefore you should do your own backups regularly before and after each major update to the website. This way you will have your own copy of the website and anytime you will be able to restore it to the last state. This way you will also have the possibility to restore it to a different web server if the repair of the original hosting computer will take some time.

Choosing a reliable web hosting company is always a good idea. This will guarantee that your visitors will always be able to visit your website. This hosting provider will have reliable web servers and will perform regular backups. But there is no hosting service that can guarantee 100% recovery in the case of failure. This would be possible but not for the money you are paying. To avoid unpleasant surprises make sure you backup your website regularly.

About the Author:

Even a simple website like http://fpga.si/ needs regular backups. Since this website has only few pages about FPGA devices and some other programmable circuits, the backup is done very quickly.