Warning Back Up Your Web site Database
This post could easily be filed under Tales from the Dark Side if I had such a category. SEO here is only a secondary concern, although there is certainly a case to be made that losing all of your pages could play a significant role in ruining your rankings. The primary concern is losing all of your hard work and depending on your site it could have a huge impact on your income.
Recently I recommended one of my favorite hosting companies to a client who I am teaching the ins and outs of blogging and WordPress. I did this because the client’s original host wasn’t working well with WordPress.
Wouldn’t you know it, the hosting company put the client on a new server and that server went down after it had only been online for a few days. Here is the message they sent:
Due to a problem with the /var partition, all db’s were erased on gator481 last week. Due to the server only having been put into production 3-4 days ago, there are no backups. If you do not have a database on the server as of right now, we will need you to reupload your database from your most recent backup. If you transferred from a
different host, you may be able to download your database from your old host and upload it here again.
Thanks,
Joshua Moncrief
I’ve been using HostGator for over 2 years and I will continue to recommend them as I’ve never had a problem in those two years. So the above is to say nothing about their dependability. It is however a serious warning. What follows is a brief explanation about many of today’s Web sites and a little tutorial on what you need to do.
I write this blog mostly for people who need to do their own Web site work, but may have little understanding of the inner workings of their site. They simply need it to work. Like a lot of SEO professionals I have found that WordPress is an excellent content management system / blogging platform and I regularly recommend it . In fact, if I am building a site for a client I don’t even consider any other platform. However, my guess is that most of my clients don’t know that their “pages” aren’t actual html files, but live in a database. What this means is that if the database gets wiped out as it did in the above situation it really doesn’t matter that they have their theme files. All their “pages” will be gone.
How do you back up your database?
The procedure is pretty simple as long as your host uses cPanel. Simply login to your cPanel which will be mydomain.com/cpanel/ and look for the word “Backups” and its icon. Click this and you’ll be taken to a page where you’ll see back up home directory and back up mysql. The home directory is a full back up of everything. You may only want to back up your mysql databases if you use a database driven site. I would suggest you back up your database weekly and your home site monthly, or whenever you make changes.