Almost every business, whether it is a start-up, developing business, or an established business, owns a website in the current age. Introducing your business over the Internet makes it possible for you to reach your potential customers from all over the world and, consequently, expand your business revenue to a more significant extent. The website plays a crucial part in making the development of your business online. It is hosted on a web server that stores and secures its data and files. However, just as the online business can grow in a few clicks, its data security also can be damaged in a few clicks. The more exposure your business gets over the web, the more vulnerable it becomes to cyber attacks.
It is a fact that each element of the website is capable of determining the progress or downfall of your business. It is the need of an hour that being a website owner, you must take all the security measures strictly, including-
- Antivirus (AV) scanning
- Security awareness training
- Proactive password management
- Web application firewall (WAF) configuration
Though you can implement the best cybersecurity practices to your business website and other physical security to its server, there still always remains a slight possibility of website data loss. Thus, to prevent and acquire the lost data, you can have another technology assisting your business website, which is known by the name backup.
This guide will direct you to dive into the insights about backups, the necessities to backup your website, how to backup data, and various other related aspects of website backup.
Table of Contents
Backing up the Website
To back up the website implies making a copy of all the website data. In other words, a website backup is the storage of its data and files in other locations also, from where they can be restored at the original place if required. An ideal website backup incorporates everything which is essential, and you would require to restore, in case the data is lost from the website or the web server becomes unavailable—for example, backing up website files, email, databases, etc. It may also include the logs if you have executed security information and event management (SIEM) on your website.
In general, what gets included in the backup storage will depend upon the facility granted by your online backup provider. Nevertheless, always keep in mind that the more data your backup will encompass, the more beneficial it will be for your business in the future. Especially when your business website functions on a content management system, for example, WordPress, you must have a maximum data backup because Wordpress requires all of your website’s files, content, media, and databases to build itself up and run again.
There are instances where your business website’s data can be hacked, corrupted, or lost under various circumstances. In such situations, the last thing you would want to do is recreate your website from scratch. It can drain all your energy and take time as long as weeks to have your entire website back on the platform. Furthermore, meanwhile rebuilding your website, your customers, sales, search engine optimization (SEO) rankings, and branding will have to suffer immensely. Not only will your revenues go down, but you also have to pay further expenses while dealing with the website data damage.
Let us go through the significant reasons because of which you are required to keep backup for your business websites.
Reasons to Backup Your Business Website
To secure customer reliability.
You may raise your business website with the best web designing, marketing strategies, quality products and services, and other most high-grade functionalities. However, if your business website does not succeed in gaining customers’ trust, every aspect of it will go in vain. You can only generate profit if the customers have an assurance of safety on your website and are ready to buy services or products from it. They rely upon your website and share their required sensitive information. It becomes your responsibility to secure their data on your website against any kind of threat. Therefore, it is always a smart option to have a backup for the website’s data. In case, the data is lost, you can restore it from the backup taken and will not lose the customers’ trust. Many companies often suggest to their customers to take a backup of their data at their end. But as an accountable website owner, you must always have a backup of the website data that incorporates customer data and information at your end also. It helps retain the customers in your business and build a better reputation in the industry while gaining more reliance from further potential customers.
To make data migration easier.
Initially, most people opt for the shared server hosting service to host their business website, as it is cheaper than other hosting options and does not require much maintenance. It can be possible that some people will prefer to go directly for high-grade hosting services from the start of their business according to the web resources requirements. Whatever may be the case, with the progress and changing business needs over the period of time, people require to migrate their data from one server to another. It can be a restless task when it comes to data migration. However, if you keep your data backups available, then migrating your data from an old server to a new server can become an effortless job. Moreover, the backup of your business website will save you time as well as your additional costs of data migration that might be there. When you run a business website, you must value your time and money as they are the most crucial assets of your business panning. You can invest your saved time and money to look over the other aspects of your business that may require attention at a particular moment.
To guard the invested time, efforts, and money.
While building your website, you will require to spend most of your energy and time. According to your business level, you will also have to invest your money in the creation of a website, its hostings, and other facilities. Your efforts and time only get multiplied when you start operating your website. In not a single thought, you can wonder about losing all the hard work that you put into developing your online business website – the customizations done to the website, money spent, time consumed, content created, network build, etc., all this done to make everything work just smoothly. Moreover, you will have to call up and hire the same person who may have helped you with building the functionalities of the website as he only would know the codebases of your website. In case that person becomes unavailable at that time, you will have to suffer further loss. Therefore, it becomes perpetually crucial to have backups of the website so that you can restore all your hard work if it gets lost, corrupted, or unknowingly get modified without permission, even due to the slightest chance.
To prevent the existing revenue.
If you own a website that helps produce revenue through content, products, or services, then risking them will lead your income to suffer. Moreover, a content-driven website requires everything to get created from scratch every time it is damaged.
Suppose you operate an eCommerce website, and you put the websites’ data in sort of risk. In that case, you will need to rebuild all the product pages, category pages, and other involved sub-categories once the website is infected. Additionally, when the website goes offline under the affected situation, any kind of existing revenue from the site will simply go on hold until the restoration of the website happens. The time required to restore your business website will depend upon the amount and type of data lost under a specific circumstance. It becomes very disturbing when you are the only person who has created everything from design to content for your website from scratch. Keeping a backup of your website from time to time is a wise move to prevent the existing revenue and let the website get back to its original state in the minimum time.
As we have been discussing, your website can suffer due to unauthorized modifications, cybercrime, breaching, human error, etc. due to which you need to back up for your business website. Nevertheless, there are some huge scenarios that can happen in the daily world also that strongly urge you to keep backups of your website and its data for business integrity, security, and safety purposes. Let us introduce you to such scenarios:
Case 1: Accidents or interventions on data centers
The data centers are the places where you keep or buy a server and its equipment on rent that hosts your website. Though all the data centers control and maintain the security of the place and the servers, there can still be chances that they may encounter accidents and interventions. It means your servers are not free of danger too. Corruption in the server will lead your business website to get affected directly negatively. It is because the server only enables you to store the website’s data and files on it, operate the website, and provide security to your website.
Recently, this year, the OVHcloud faced a massive fire accident on the SBG1 and SBG2 data centers. In this incident, the fire destroyed four rooms out of 12 in the adjacent SBG1 data center and the entire thing in the SBG2 data center. As a result, all four data centers shut their power off, and SBG3 shut its UPS down. Nearly 3.6 million websites have gone offline, and 464,000 distinct domains were taken offline by the fire as per the network monitor site Netcraft’s information. Although the OVHcloud has declared the intentions of reopening the data centers on its Strasbourg site in the coming week with various solutions to the problem that happened after this catastrophic fire accident. The rest loss of the clients and customers you can yourself imagine. This incident must have clearly depicted you with the utmost requirement of taking the business website’s backups, especially when they are the source of income for you.
Case 2 – The owner meets with an accident and owns a higher authority of management
As a website owner, you will have most of the significant things under your control, for example – account accessibility, database management, server access, upgradation and modification authority, configurations handle, control panel functions, etc. Indeed, you will own the higher authority of management if all these things operate under your power. As we know, life is quite unpredictable, and thus, you may encounter accidents in your life where you will lose all your control over your business website and its functions. It will always be a great step to make a nominee for your business website who can take over your business after you lose the authority to keep the business progressing. However, to make sure that your nominee can quickly get along with your running business, you must keep your business website’s backup that he/she can utilize. It will help the nominated person handle your website, and moreover, it reduces the chances of the third person to intervene in your business and attempt any fraud with it. Through backup, the nominee can take over the business the way he/she wants and according to the necessities at the moment.
Case 3: When the hard disk crashes
There are times when after implementing all the required security to your business website, you may suffer data loss or website damage when the hard disk crashes at an unexpected time. The hard disk crashes can happen due to any of the following reasons –
Power issues – In case the flow of electricity is interrupted and made to restart again, it results in power surges. The power surges can arise due to other reasons as well, such as lightning strikes to power line interference. The power issues play a considerable role in crashing the hard disk and permanent data loss.
Water damage – There can be times when the liquid gets spilled on the computer system damaging the hardware parts unintentionally. It further results in unwanted surges in the electrical current, which severely damages the device.
Firmware Corruption – Firmware corruption such as BSY produced by Seagate and other such cases leads to complete data destruction.
Hardware Failure – It may arise as a result of reading/writing heads touching or gouging into the device’s disks as it causes damage to the platter’s magnetic surfaces. The single word describing this situation is head crash. Other problems can happen with the controller board of the drive. All these situations lead to permanent data loss and hardware failure.
Human error – Human error arises when we get unsuccessful in handling the hard disk drive. It can happen when you may delete the files directly from the disk drive accidentally.
Excessive heat – Due to the rise in temperature in your system’s surroundings, disk platters expand and then contract with a temperature decrease. Consequently, it distorts the magnetic surface developing micro-cracks on it that further results in data loss.
Case 4: When Ransomware strikes, it affects your entire business
Ransomware is a type of malware that targets encrypting the victim’s website files. Once the attacker becomes successful, he demands a ransom from the victim by offering the victim restore access to the data upon payment. The attacker provides instructions for how to pay the ransom amount to acquire the decryption key. The amount can range from a few hundred dollars to thousands according to your online business level. The amount is payable to cybercriminals or attackers in Bitcoin.
The ransomware works through a number of vectors to achieve access to the victim’s computer. The most common mode is phishing spam. The phishing spam comes up as an attachment in an email of the victim. As soon as the victim downloads and opens it, the attacker can get complete control over the victim’s computer system. After then, the victim can only access the system after decrypting the process through a mathematical key that is known to an attacker.
Therefore, it becomes imperative for you to keep different backups of your business website to safeguard your business data so that no attacker can threaten you to pay any amount of money.
Procure the Best Backup Services Globally
Now, after comprehending the necessities to take the backups for your business website, you must be only wondering about which company can provide you with the best backup plans and platforms. To always be in a stress-free state with the thought that no matter what happens, in the end, your website data is in no way slipping away from your reach, you must look for a reliable, recognized, and quality-services providing hosting company, which can assure about the complete safety of your business website data.
To lighten your load, let us introduce you to one such hosting company that provides the best services for website backups – Server Wala.
The Server Wala company is among the most influential and reputed organizations in the Corporate World. It has been receiving various awards that signify its professionals’ commitment towards rendering the best and satisfying services to the clients. The company technical professionals possess the expertise and experience in the provided tech services and, moreover, have acquired certifications for the same. The company focuses on letting its customers build and advance their online business at a higher pace without worrying much about security and safety issues. It incorporates prominent backups platforms for the customers where they can have unlimited backups of their websites’ data and files. Along with the backup facilities, the company is also at the front foot in providing numerous privileges to its customers. Some of them are mentioned below –
- It comprises Enterprise-Grade Hardware.
The company ensures a powerful aggregate of hardware tools, including RAM, SSD, and Intel Core processor, to have a great end-user experience.
- It gives DDoS Protection.
It renders the highest data security level that incorporates an SSL certificate and 2048 encryption security under all its data centers hosting plans.
- It renders Premium Network.
The company is always recognized for providing the premium network that not only intensifies the business website load time and performance but also renders the secure network connection all around the world.
- It provides Low Latency.
Under the company’s hosting services, you can enable your business website to run twenty times faster with enhanced security, reliability, and speed of its servers.
- It is always ready to give passionate support.
The company’s professionals are always on their feet to render 24/7 customer support and technical assistance. They provide the best solutions under the minimum response time. You can connect with them through various modes of communication anytime you wish, such as – email, live chat, whatsapp, skype chatbot over their website.
How to backup your website?
The most modest way to have a website backup is to create a full server backup and a snapshot. It allows you to restore any individual file or a complete snapshot when required under a certain situation. In case you are maintaining only a web application, then you can think of integration for backing up raw files and databases distinct to that app. In comparison, the email users can simply create copies of their emails to a local folder from a desktop email client.
How often should you create backups for your business website?
The answer to this question lies in how often you are updating or upgrading your website. If you update your website in less than a month, it will be better to take a backup before every change. In case you are making changes within your website quite often, then it is advised to take backup weekly. However, if the changes are being made almost daily, then you have to look for more advanced backup platforms and solutions that can manage and maintain differential and incremental backups.
- A Differential backup involves website data that has been modified since the last full backup.
- An incremental backup comprises website data that has altered since the latest backup, full or incremental.
Where can you keep the backups?
You must keep in mind not to keep the backups on the same server. After taking backups, ensure that they are working efficiently and then go ahead storing them in multiple locations that can involve-an external drive such as hard disk, SSD, NVMe, tape, etc., and/or cloud storage provider for example, Dropbox, Google Workspace, etc.
For how long should you keep backups?
The response to this question depends on how much storage capacity is accessible to you. If you are unable to store more than three full backups, then remember to keep the latest backup along with the one that was taken at the beginning of the month.
