Your web hosting solution should include some form of backup. Here's why.

First, a true story from my own personal web hosting experience. I was working at a web hosting company many years ago. The company had acquired various hosting brands and was consolidating and migrating customers from various disparate systems onto a single platform. There was a brand in this migration process that consisted of a single server for resellers. This was pretty much the oldest server on the planet - the previous company hadn’t really maintained the brand and so the decision was made to sunset (read kill) the brand. So the communication process started.

The company repeatedly begged the resellers on this particular server to migrate to a different account plan. Incentives were given, special offers tendered - but still there remained the resolute few who - for whatever the reason - simply refused to migrate. As you would expect, that fateful day arrived when something absolutely catastrophic occurred with the server. Now of course the host had no intention of restoring the server, and once again simply went about damage control and helped clients set up their accounts onto new servers.

So my friend was working in a cubicle around the way from me and I could here him talking to one of the resellers whose data had been on that server. He kept speaking in reassuring terms for what seemed like a really long time. The call finally ended, and my friend just had this very bewildered look on his face. I asked him what happened. ”That guy had all his data on that server. I told him that the data was lost, and suggested that he restore his customer sites from his backups. He said that he didn’t have any backups and that his business was finished…then he started crying.”

Here is another true story - not from many years ago - but from a couple of days ago.

The Register is reporting that Vaserv.com, a UK based web hosting company, suffered a large scale malicious attack that completely destroyed the data of as many as 100,000 websites on Sunday. According to the report the hackers were able to gain root access to the company’s system, by exploiting a critical vulnerability in HyperVM, a virtualization application made by a company called LXLabs. Here’s the real tragedy - The Register went on to state that ”Some 50 percent of Vaserv’s customers signed up for unmanaged service, which doesn’t include data backup. It remains unclear of those website owners will ever be able to retrieve their lost data. As a result, at least half the websites that were hosted on the site remain offline.”

No matter what the circumstance that leads to data corruption or loss, there is simply no substitute for consistent and robust backups of your data. Here are 3 simple rules to follow if you want your websites and data to survive a disaster.

1. Backup your data, and do it regularly (daily if you can, weekly if you can’t). Clearly an automated mechanism is best.

2. Offsite backups are best. These are backups that are physically and geographically separated from the problems that lead to data loss.

3. Never use a web hosting solution that doesn’t include some form of backup.