Nearly every hosting plan sold in Britain says “daily backups” somewhere on the page. The phrase can mean a proper copy taken away each night and kept for a month. It can also mean one file sitting on the same disk as your website, written over every morning at four.
Both descriptions are honest. Only one of them saves you.
A backup you can rely on has four properties. It lives somewhere other than the machine it came from. It goes back far enough to cover a problem you did not notice straight away. It contains the database as well as the files. And somebody has restored one recently to prove the whole thing works. Miss any of those and you have a comforting label rather than a safety net.
A copy on the same server is a convenience
Snapshots stored beside your website are genuinely handy. Botch a plugin update at half four on a Friday and you can put it back in seconds without waiting for anybody, which is one of the reasons keeping WordPress updated is less frightening than people assume.
They stop helping the moment the underlying machine is the problem. A failed disk takes your website and its backup together. A server compromised badly enough to encrypt or delete files does the same, and ransomware goes looking for backup folders on purpose. So does an account suspended in a billing dispute, and so does a hosting company that shuts down at short notice. It is why the first thing we want to know about a hacked WordPress site is which clean copies exist and how old they are.
Off-site means a second machine in a second building, holding a copy you could retrieve even if your server never came back on. That is the copy that matters, and it is the one we take daily for everything we host.
How far back can you actually go?
Retention is the part that gets skipped, and it changes everything. “Daily” with one stored copy gives you a single day of history. Whatever went wrong, you get to go back to yesterday and nowhere else.
The trouble is that the disasters you spot immediately are seldom the costly ones. Somebody injects spam pages into a corner of the site and they sit there for a fortnight before your rankings sag. A form quietly stops emailing you and you find out when a customer asks why nobody rang back. A staff member deletes a batch of products and it surfaces at stocktake. In every one of those cases yesterday’s copy already contains the damage.
So ask how many daily copies are kept, and whether anything older is retained on top. A run of recent days plus a few weekly or monthly points behind them covers far more real situations than a single overnight file ever will.
Files and database, not one or the other
People are often surprised by how a WordPress site is split up. Your pages, posts, product descriptions, orders, users and settings live in a database. Your images, theme and plugins are ordinary files on the disk. They are stored in two different ways, and a backup has to grab both.
Restore the files without the database and you get a working installation with nothing in it. Restore the database without the files and you get all your words with every picture missing and the design gone. Neither is a recovery.
Two other gaps are worth checking. Some cheap backup tools skip large media folders to keep storage costs down, which is fine until the folder they skipped held eight years of photographs. And email is frequently backed up on a completely different schedule from the website, or not at all. Ask about mailboxes specifically, because losing those hurts every bit as much as losing the site.
How long a restore really takes
The copying is usually the quick part. A small brochure site comes back in minutes. A shop carrying years of orders and thousands of images takes longer, because the archive has to travel back from off-site storage and a large database import is not instant. An hour or two is a fair expectation for something substantial, and anyone promising you thirty seconds has not restored a big site lately.
What dominates the total, though, is not the machine. It is how quickly a human starts. If restoring means opening a ticket at a company that answers within two working days, your fifteen-minute restore has become a two-day outage. Some budget hosts also charge a fee to pull a backup for you, which is a nasty thing to learn in the middle of an emergency.
Two questions settle it. Who performs the restore, and how soon do they begin? Both answers cost you nothing to get hold of this week, and a great deal to discover on the morning you need them.
Going back costs you whatever arrived since
Every restore has a price, and it is paid in whatever landed after the copy was taken. On a site that collects the odd contact form entry, the price is nothing worth talking about. On anything where information arrives all day, putting yesterday’s copy back takes the enquiries, the bookings and the payments away with the problem, and takes the record that any of them happened as well. That is a second mess in the shape of the first one.
So the question worth asking is not how far back you can go. It is how little you have to go back, which is exactly what a run of recent copies buys you. It is also why a restore on a busy site is rarely one button: put the broken part back, keep the data that arrived while it was broken, and reconcile whatever falls between the two. That needs somebody who understands the software as well as the server, and it is a large part of what separates WooCommerce hosting from ordinary shared hosting with a shop bolted on.
Test one before you need one
Backups fail silently. A job stops running after a server change and carries on reporting success. A database export truncates because it hit a memory limit. Storage fills up and new copies stop being written. None of that announces itself, and every one of them is found on the day you need the file.
The cure is dull and effective: restore one somewhere harmless and look at it. Put it on a test address, log in, click through the important pages, check the images load, place a test order if you sell things. Do it once a quarter and you will know where you stand rather than assuming.
If you host with somebody else, one question does most of the work: when did you last restore a customer site from backup? A host who does it regularly will answer immediately and probably tell you a story about it.
Where we stand on this
Daily off-site backups are part of managed hosting here at £1 a day + VAT, taken away from the machine they came from, and nobody has to opt in to them or remember to switch them on. Retention, what is included for a particular site, and how a restore gets started are the sort of thing we would rather tell you on the phone about your actual setup than print as a slogan, because the useful answer changes with what the site is doing.
That is deliberately unexciting. It is also the difference between a bad afternoon and a rebuild from scratch. There is more about how we set sites up on our web hosting page.
Website Backup FAQs
What does off-site backup actually mean?
It means the copy is held on different hardware in a different building from your website. If the server fails, is compromised or is switched off, the copy survives because it was never on that machine. A backup stored on the same disk as the site disappears with it, which is the situation off-site storage exists to prevent.
How many days of backups should a host keep?
More than one. A single overnight copy only lets you return to yesterday, and plenty of problems go unnoticed for a week or more. Several recent days, with some older weekly or monthly points behind them, covers far more real situations. Ask any host for its retention period rather than assuming it is generous.
How long does it take to restore a website from backup?
A small site can be back in minutes. A large shop with years of orders and images may take an hour or two, because the archive has to come back from off-site storage and the database import takes time. The bigger variable is how quickly a person starts work, which depends entirely on your host.
Do website backups include email?
Not automatically. Mailboxes are often backed up separately from the website, on a different schedule, and sometimes not at all on cheaper plans. If your business runs on email, ask the question directly and pin down what is copied, how often, and how quickly a mailbox can be put back.
Check yours this week
Have a look at your current arrangement while nothing is on fire. Where do the copies go, how many are kept, and who presses the button? If you cannot get a clear answer out of your host, ring us on 01623 650 333 and put the same questions to us. We have been asked them by enough people over the years to answer without going away to check.
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