Website Backup Solutions Under Shared Hosting
Shared web hosting is cheap and space is used by lots of clients. Because of this, there's no 100% guarantee over data protection. In case some day you can not visit the space suddenly, backup is quite important. It's responsible to our websites and our hardworking. Here we introduce the popular backup solutions based editorial experience. However, keep in mind we have to put into action other than just learning different ways, we have dangerous experience about this!
Manual Backup
Simple and basic backup solution. To most websites, there's very low frequency of source code change, it's more about database updates instead. In this case, we can download all data to local disk drive via FTP. When we make changes to template or files, do backup again. Because database is the most important part, we must export at times to make sure we have the newest version on hand.
Login to your cpanel control panel and click the "phpMyadmin" icon then select your desired database. Follow this graphic instructions on how to export in phpmyadmin
(click to open in new window for large view)
The weakness of manual backup is less efficient, we have to operate everything manually. If any sudden case happens, we might loose days or weeks data.
Backup Functions in Hosting Control Panel
Most web hosting control panels provide backup/restore functions, we can improve efficiency greatly using such tools. Since cpanel is the most popular control panel solution, we'll briefly guide on how to make backups under it.
Firstly, let's login cpanel control panel and click "Backups" then navigate to backup page.
1. Backup all websites files. click "HomeDirectory" then it will download a compressed package including all folders/files under "public_html" directory to local computer.
2. Backup database. Click database name under "DATABASES" to start downloading zipped package for this database. If we have multiple databases then repeat this one after another. In case any problem happens in future, click "Upload" on right side to make full restoration.
Website Backup Functions
Many websites are created by CMS softwares that come with backup function themselves. Even there's not, there're always third party plugins for this purpose such as wordpress. For wordpress, there's a popular plugin "Database Backup" for efficient database backup.
Third Party Backup Tools
Third party tools are probably the most scalable & efficient ways. But mostly it requires server end support. Here we highly recommend dropbox which is easy and stable. Dropbox is supported by different platforms with up to 5G free storage. The core part is control over different backup versions, we can restore from different available backups easily.
Check out this official wiki on how to configure on shared space.
Again, no matter for website or database backup, it's easy to handle. The most important part is our mind, we must seriously treat the work and action now! Or else when our sites run into problem but no backup, any tool is useless.
