Once you have a website for your business, you need to back it up. Your website is now an asset of your company and it needs to be protected. Even if you just started your website, you’ll want to protect any work you or your developer has put into it.
Backups are essential in case your website goes down, the hosting company has a problem, your website gets hacked, or perhaps there’s something wrong with some code or a plugin that causes a fatal error. You want a backup copy so we can put your website back up.
You can manually download a copy of your website and database files. You’ll need to store them on your computer or external hard drive. But when you restore them, you’ll need to know how to upload your files to your hosting account.
It’s much easier to use a backup service like CodeGuard. Hosting companies like Host Gator and Blue Host offer them as an add-on service for an additional fee to your hosting package. It’s well worth it because they monitor the code of your website and notify you of any changes (again, if anyone hacks your site and makes changes) and they keep backup files of your site so you can revert to a previous version.
CodeGuard allows you to easily see that the website has been backed up and when it will run the next backup. You can restore to any of your backups. It’s a seamless set up with Host Gator and Blue Host. And, you can control how often you back up.
I highly recommend CodeGuard and I will not do any work to develop your website unless you have a system in place for backing up.