A website’s security, continued success and even its very existence is of fundamental importance for a site owner. What happens when you need to restore a site due to damage that can be caused by any number of factors, but then discover the data you thought was being backed-up and stored safely doesn’t actually exist? Sometimes the best case scenario can be only having a woefully out of date site that does not contain your most recent changes, data and information. The worst case scenario is that you encounter the ultimate site restore horror story and discover you do not have any backups at all!
That won’t happen to you though right? Everyone probably thinks this as they have taken steps to prevent such a scenario and
That won’t happen to you though right? Everyone probably thinks this as they have taken steps to prevent such a scenario and protect them from any potential misfortune. We’ve all heard a story of someone who installed something as simple as a WordPress update, which then crashed the site and took any chance of a restore with it. Often these scenarios can cost tens of thousand of dollars in lost business, valuable time and a loss of reputation while site owners attempt to rebuild a shattered site.
As was seen in a recent article, the hosting service A2 endured major issues related to a security breach that resulted in a shut-down of all Windows services. A malware attack resulted in A2 coming to the decision that the only way to recover the corrupted data it hosted was to do a full restore from the site backups. In theory, this should have caused very few problems as full and incremental backups should be taken regularly to ensure the most recent version of the website is always available for a restore.
Unfortunately it seems that in many cases, A2 were only able to restore from old versions of customer sites, which were very different from the latest and most recent versions their customers were anticipating.
While losing information on your site/business from just a few days or even a week ago might be bad enough, some A2 customers were faced with the prospect of having a restored site that was several months out of date. It is easy to imagine the embarrassment and issues this caused businesses that rely solely on their site to make sales. A loss of reputation and an outdated site would have been a best case scenario for many though, as some were even faced with the loss of their entire site due to the lack of security and updates in place.
This isn’t an isolated case limited to A2 however. While in a previous job, Marc Lacroix (a member of our team) experienced a situation where a client had a website with an older version of PHP hosted on an old server. The client was encouraged to contact their hosting company to find out if they could upgrade to PHP 7, to which the hosting company obliged and transferred the site to a new server, with the latest version of PHP.
When checking the website afterwards, it was noticed the content were no just old and out of date, but also had parts missing. It was discovered that the latest update for the site was dated from 2 months earlier, with no sign of all the changes that had been made since then. It remains a mystery why the hosting company used a 2 month old backup instead of migrating the live site directly. Thankfully the site owner had made a fresh backup with UpdraftPlus, which was quickly uploaded and restored. Problem solved!
While many customers depend on their hosting services to make regular backups and deal with security, the examples above clearly show that there is a massive need to take control of your own backups after investing so much time and money in your website.
That is why (according to the good people at WPbuffs.com, UpdraftPlus is the best WordPress backup plugin software available and is used by companies and individuals all over the world. Should the very worst happen and your site gets completely wiped due to a hack or malware, you can rest easy knowing that you can fully restore your site simply and easily with UpdraftPlus.
Download UpdraftPlus today
