I recently received an email from a webmaster telling me that he could no longer access his website, nor could he log in to his web hosting account to investigate. "I have many articles that I wrote over the years on that website," he said. "Now they are gone. What can I do?"
But this article isn't about dealing with web hosts that close abruptly, leaving the sites hosted there high and dry. Nor is it even about reclaiming a website from a bad web designer or web host that is holding it hostage. You can read about those things from the links in the previous sentence.
It is about something that all webmasters should be doing, but too many fail to do, leading to the above situation becoming catastrophic when it could be merely heart-attack-causing and lifespan-shortening.
Yes, I'm talking about the importance of backing up your website. And with that one sentence, I'm sure that some of you have just rolled your eyes and are within a hair's breadth of clicking away.
It is the thing that many people know they have to do, and have put it in their mental to-do list to be done tomorrow, but because they are not sure how to do it, and need time to figure it out, tomorrow never comes. Besides, they say, the web host also has its own backup. Wasn't it mentioned in the advertisement?
Of course if you have designed your website using a standalone web editor like Expression Web, BlueGriffon or Dreamweaver, you automatically have a backup on your computer. This is because you created the site on your own machine, and only transferred a copy of it to your web host when you were done. So you effectively have 2 copies: one on the Internet (your website proper) and the one on your computer. If your current web host disappears, you can simply find a new one, point your domain there, upload a copy of the site to the new location, and you're back in business.
In other words, if the previous paragraph describes your situation, this article isn't targeted at you. It is for webmasters who either have blogs, Content Management Systems (CMS), or have used their web host's online web designer/editor or templates. For those webmasters, their sites are created online, so if they don't take any specific steps to make a backup, the content only exists on their web host's computer.
The back up process differs depending on how your site is designed.
If you have installed a blog or CMS onto a normal web hosting account yourself, as opposed to using a blog host, there are generally two things that you need to back up.
Connect to your website with your FTP software. If you don't know what this is or how to use one, see my FileZilla tutorial which describes how to set up and use one such free FTP program.
Download to your computer all the files on your website. Now this may seem like overkill, in that you not only retrieve your image and media uploads, configuration files, theme files and plugins that you customized, but also the unchanged original blog or CMS software. However, it lets you restore your site the fastest way in the event of a calamity, since you can simply re-upload everything again when you need to. And it gives you the assurance that you did not forget to back up any important file, which you may accidentally do if you pick and choose.
Back up your site's database. One way is to use a tool called phpMyAdmin that comes preinstalled by most web hosts. It is a web-based tool, so you just have to log into it with your browser. (You will have to find out from your web host how to access it, since the web address and method to do it varies from web host to web host.)
Very briefly, once you have logged into phpMyAdmin, click the name of your database in the left column to select it. Then click "Export", which you can find in the top row in the right column. On the screen that appears, click the "Quick" radio button to select it, and click the "Go" button. Your browser will then ask you for the location to save the file and the name to give it. Once you do that, the file will be downloaded to your system.
The above procedure applies generally to most blog software, including WordPress (on which I have used the steps above), and CMS programs. It's possible that your software may require you to back up other things, so you should probably read their documentation to see if other steps are needed for a complete backup.
In the event your web host closes suddenly, all you need to do is to get a new web host, point your domain to that new location, create a database with the same name and password you used at the old, upload the files you backed up with your FTP program, log into phpMyAdmin at that new host, and import the database you saved. Your site will miraculously spring back to life, in the exact state you last backed up.
Incidentally, popular blog software (eg, WordPress) and CMSes often have third-party plugins that can automatically back up the site on a regular basis. If you use them, and the backups are stored on your web host's system, remember to download them to your own computer. Otherwise, they will be like fool's gold. ("Oh no! My web host has gone! Fear not, I have cunningly made lots of backups for such an eventuality. Where are those backups, you ask? Well, I saved them on my web host.")
By blog host, I mean a web host that has a specific blog software preinstalled. On such hosts, you don't need to install any software yourself, nor can you.
Whether you can back up your posts here in a convenient fashion depends on the software they use. The big blog hosts normally provide a way where you can "export" your posts and the comments that your users leave. These typically only contain your words and your visitor's words. If your blog host uses WordPress, the exported file also contains the categories and tags for your posts. You will have to find a way to save any pictures and videos that you have inserted into your blog separately. At worst, go to the individual web pages in your browser and manually save them on your computer.
As for the design/appearance of your blog, or the customizations that you make to it, such as colour ("color" in US English) changes, etc, I'm not sure they can be saved in any useful way (ie, in a way that you can restore automatically).
Restoring your blog on a new blog host is a bit more problematic. It depends whether the new host uses the same blog software as the old, and if not, whether they support the format of your exported file. If they don't, you may have to enter all your old posts manually, and probably lose all the user comments on your old blog. You may also have to redesign the blog.
This point is for those who have used the online web editor (or design software) that your web host provided. You are in this boat if you have created a site by logging into your web hosting account with a web browser, picking and customizing designs and typing your content directly there.
In general, such sites are at the mercy of the web host, which could be one of the reasons why so many of them provide such a service. Not only do such services attract a lot of people who don't know better, those people become captive customers who cannot move elsewhere without redoing their entire site. See Is It Better to Use an Online Site Builder or a Standalone Web Editor? if you don't know why.
If the web host does not provide you a means of saving a copy of your website on your own computer, you will have to do it manually. Visit every page of your site with a web browser, and save each page (complete with all the pictures and everything) onto your computer.
You will not be able to restore your site to another web host as-is, but at least you still have a copy of your content. This way, you can at least design a new website on a new host, and paste your existing content. Note that you probably cannot reuse your old design, since the design elements (like decorative pictures) will probably belong to your old web host.
Incidentally, even if that host allows you to back up your website, if that backup is in some proprietary format that can only be imported back into their own interface, I suggest that you manually back up page by page with a browser as well. Otherwise, your backup will be useless if you need to move to a new web host.
If you are reading this, and have not started building a website yet, I recommend that you do not use any web host's built-in editor. Either use a normal web editor, or install a blog or a Content Management System. The latter two will still allow you to log into your site and design and post from there, but they don't have the crippling long term disadvantages of using a web host's built-in editor.
I know that this article is not the solution to the specific crisis posed by my visitor. It was not intended to be. It is meant to preempt such a situation occurring in the first place. No one wants this kind of problem, where your web host, on whom you rely for your online business and livelihood, suddenly disappears, taking your site with it. Or their hard disk containing your website crashes and their backups are found to be corrupted. Or their system is hacked, or infected by ransomware.
Backups are one of those things that feels like a colossal waste of time as you're doing it. But if and when disaster rears its ugly head, you will be really glad to have them on hand.
Copyright © 2017-2018 Christopher Heng. All rights reserved.
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The Crucial Task Often Forgotten by New Webmasters (Until It's Too Late)
