Hosting Backup Secret Revealed
Hosting server end backup is quite essential for urgent data recovery. In case you do not make your local backup or you can't upload it in quick time, server end service will give big help. However, you might have learnt the importance of backup service and looking for such hosting provider to keep your data in safe place. However, have you learnt the backup policy will vary a lot from different hosting companies? We have compiled a list of common difference among popular hosting providers regarding to their backup policies
Full Daily Backup
This would be the greatest solution for user needs. A full daily backup service will backup all data in customer account including website files, email/ftp accounts, databases and even access logs. In this way, all your account data will be copied to backup drive with time lables for future retrival purpose. It's perfect for clients but not so good for hosting providers because they will have to prepare a big backup system and do lots of daily works to ensure it's performing properly and no existing services will be affected. Daily backup is normally handled at midnight when the least traffic being generated by users.
Weekly Backup
Daily backup will simply keep lots of duplicated data if there's no change at all with your account. In order to save space, some providers will backup on weekly basis. Depends your data change frequency they might backup once or twice a week over your account for different services like emails, database. Some popular hosting brands like ixwebhosting is doing weekly backup and even on monthly basis for some services.
Partial Backup
Logically, this would be the best solution for either clients or hosting providers. The partial backup will only work once you made any change to your account. For example if you have deleted a file or made any update to your existing database, the backup system will instantly take a backup of the old ones. This solution will consume the least disk storage and system resources. If you never made a change to your site then there's no backup at all. However, the backup system will be complicated to setup and you must ensure the accuracy or else you don't know when it will go wrong. Most of the time, hosting providers will have to program their own softwares to handle the task automatically.
About Retrivable Periods
As explained for above different backup policies, you can retrieve backups on daily, weekly or monthly basis. However, for most of the cases you can only get up to 30 days back. Because backup system will take lots of space and system resource but hosting companies are almost non profitable for this service. They can not always keep your backup data on server end. Once your old backup reached the preset life cycle, it will be relaced by new backups. With editorial experience, the actual backup people can retrieve from hosting service is up to 15 days. Many companies only keep it up to 10 days in order to allocate more resources for live web services.
Maybe you have worried about your data security since they kept your backup in their system. Actually they won't keep your backup data for long time so there's no security issue to your account. If you no longer need their hosting service, they will clear out everything once your passed the due date.
About restoration fee
What happens when you request backup from hosting server? You might have the option to restore directly in hosting account or you might be asked to pay some fees. You absolutely don't feel good to pay for this service because that's your data and you have full rights to it. However, please remember sometimes the charge is reasonable. First, hosting company did great efforts to keep your data in safe place. Unless it's a server end failure, there's really no reason for them to provide backup service especially when it's a non profitable service. If your account data is quite important, your local backup is a MUST. Not just about retrival fees, if hosting server crashed with no backup left, you can still get your site alive again from another space.
Who can provide quality backup service with fantastic customer service? Arvixe is the best by our editorial experience if you have read our data loss story. They will backup your account on daily basis with fast response if you want to recover a specific backup from their system. If you highly rely on server end backup services, arvixe is your best choice.
Visit arvixe for hosting plans http://www.arvixe.com
