Now, where is that backup?

Just read the quotes below and tell me if you have ever heard them.

Hi, do you know what has happened to XXXXX webhost. They have been down for 10 days and I ain’t heard anything.

I HAEV LOSTED AL MAH DATA AS MAH WEBHOST WENT DOWN WUT CAN I DO

Does anyone know what happened to XXX Datacenter ?

This is a very common thing that I hear and I will only hear it more during the summer. Nowadays anyone can set up a website and host one but very often people will choose a free web host that is set up due to some teenagers being bored during the summer.

With as little as £8 you can buy a reseller account and start giving away free hosting to anyone that wants it. Normally these teenagers believe they will get rich doing it and while it can be a quick buck sadly it normally involves the person noticing they are not making any money from it and then scraping it.

This then leaves the average people who got that free web hosting screwed over as they have lost their website and very often have no backup either.

Now, this blog post isn’t about who the best free host but it is about what to do to prepare yourself in case it happens.

Step 1

The first thing to do is NOT to use a subdomain that your new host might give you. Instead, get your domain or at least a subdomain like co. cc or one of the many from afraid.org. The reason is that if your host goes down you will still be in control of the domain or subdomain which means you won’t lose all the backlinks you have gained.

Step 2

ALWAYS backup and make backups. The reason behind making sure to back up your website is that if your host dies and leaves you without your files you will at least have a backup of your website that you can then restore at another host later on.

Backing up a website is annoying but you can often set up a CRON to back up your website and then send it to another location in which at least your backup can stay for the short term. If you need a remote location to back up your website, go to – adrive.com and sign up for a free account.

Now the best place for your backup to be is on your hard drive so once you have backed up make sure to download that backup to your hard drive. Now, if you backed up remotely every day you don’t need to download the backup every day (While it would be better too) but I have found that if you download the latest at least once a week you should be fine.

Once it is on the hard drive what you do then is up to you. Such examples are to burn it to a CD and keep them in storage in case something happens, or even to just show off to the world that you have a backup.

Should you do all this and if your web host dies you can move on with little downtime.