You never know when you’re going to have a website disaster. At Novak Solutions, we’ve been called in to help with all kinds of website deaths. We’ve seen websites taken down by viruses, websites taken over by viruses, websites lost due to unpaid hosting, websites lost due to an angry ex-employee or ex-contractor, and websites that just broke for no apparent reason. Most small businesses in the Infusionsoft space have WordPress websites, which is awesome … until it isn’t. WordPress is notorious for becoming bloated and buggy when a website is modified over and over and over again. Our own WordPress website became so slow that we decided to completely rebuild it when did our last redesign instead of modifying what we already had.
The point is – your website is an incredibly valuable piece of your business, and you’ve probably invested thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in it. No matter where your website is hosted or who manages it for you, you need to keep a backup. A website backup gives you two crucial abilities.
- If your website is corrupted or lost for any reason, you can get it back up with just a few button clicks (or paying a tech guy a couple hundred dollars to make the clicks for you)
- If you need to switch web hosts for any reason, you already have your website packaged up and ready. With a couple clicks (or just getting a tech guy) you have it back up and running exactly as it was before.
How do I backup my website?
Most web hosts provide a backup service for you. You just need to turn it on (and for some web hosts, you have to pay extra for the service).
GoDaddy provides a “Backup” tool in the Files section of your hosting account. You can create and download a backup from this page, but it tells you that automatic backups must be enabled by your “server administrator”. A quick check into their help pages uncovers that you have to add “Site Backup” to your account, which starts at $1.99 per month (considering the importance of backups, that is pretty cheap).
Here’s the link for more info: https://www.godaddy.com/help/add-site-backup-to-your-account-18557
HostGator says that they take automatic weekly backups “on a random day”, but they only keep one backup and the next week overwrites the old backup. Some issues go unnoticed for months at a time – you need more than just a single backup. Their “Professional” CodeGuard backup service costs $4.17 per month in order to provide sufficient backups for a business critical website.
We highly recommend contacting your website provider (whether you login to your account and do it yourself or contact them over the phone or via support chat) and ask them about your backup options. Make sure that you have at least 1 month’s worth of backups, and download a full backup to your computer every month or two or any time you make a significant change. The last thing you want to experience is being locked out of your web hosting account with no way to get your website back from them.
Not sure if your Infusionsoft database is large enough to warrant a backup solution?
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