WebTerritory makes every effort to have all its hosted sites stable and working properly. However despite all the topnotch equipment used things can still go wrong (Murphy’s Law).
Last week a problem occurred with a database (corrupted tables) that brought down the SQL server. Once I was notified of the problem, the problem files were removed and SQL server was brought back up. The thing is the corrupted and removed database files were belonging to my WHMCS what I use to manage all the client accounts! (ex: billing/invoicing)
Luckily there was a backup available, my upstream provider does a back up of my server a few times a week. However that back up is their backup for if the entire server goes down (not really for restoring individual sites or files). They were nice enough to restore the files (at a point before being corrupted) because they were partly responsible for the failure in the first place.
This incident served as a tap on the shoulder for myself. The point here is that your website on any server could become unrecoverable whether it be equipment failure, software/configuration error and/or attack from hackers. Whenever you make changes to your site or just before and/or after an update you should have an up to date backup made. Also a program or script that makes scheduled backups of your site (somewhere between midnight and six am) would be a good idea.
Legal note: Even though WebTerritory makes every effort to keep your website up and running smoothly, we are not responsible for the content nor the backing up of and/or having backups of your website/content.
WebTerritory provides manual backup tools in your website’s cPanel for you to use, however recommends that you use a plugin/script that makes regular daily backups of your site (in the early am hours).
The site admin usually performs updates and maintenance during the mid to late am hours so if something does go wrong it can be dealt with before the afternoon to late evening peak traffic.
It is also recommended that you have backup files that are kept off site (on your own computer or a cloud/file storage service) that are updated at least once a week.
Use of a third party backup service is allowed as long as it does not cause undo load on your account or our server. Remember uploading data from your account to another server counts towards your bandwidth usage.
To sum it all up it is recommended to have daily on site backups (in case an update or routine maintenance goes wrong) and weekly off site backups (in case of lost/corrupted files).