Having a good, restorable backup copy of your website is something that OnSiteWP cannot stress enough. It’s why we include WordPress site backups with all of our maintenance packages. One of the frequently asked questions we receive is why do we perform backups when your hosting company is also doing backups? The answer is very simple: redundancy. Even the top names in web hosting have mistakes. It’s best to have the insurance of your own backup copy.
At some point in the lifespan of your website, you’re likely to experience a failure. We regularly see people reaching out for help on the internet when their website goes down. The story I’m about to annotate is typical and yet lucky, because the original poster was keeping a backup.
Our poster contacted the technical support at his web hosting company. First line support tried to help but didn’t give a very satisfactory answer. I don’t blame tech support for this. They are great at performing tasks within their purview such as resetting your cpanel password but they are generally not WordPress experts.
The first commentor (in blue) did a good job at confirming the problem. All of his core WordPress files are gone!
Luckily, the original poster has found a calm and rational person to work through the issue with him. On the Internet you’re likely to get a full smorgasbord of opinions on how to solve your problem.
We see the original poster go through the phases of grief by asking “how can files suddenly disappear?” Unfortunately there are many ways. It could have been user error, an accidental bug in the software, or a malicious script taking advantage of vulnerable plugins. While not likely the culprit in this case, corrupt filesystems and hardware errors are also ways to lose files in a catastrophic way.
VaultPress is a backup plugin and subscription service for WordPress. Our original poster saved his tail and thousands of dollars of web developer time by restoring his website instead of needing to start from scratch.
This is the time to ask yourself: Do you keep good up to date copies of your website?
At OnSiteWP we use a different backup plugin than VaultPress but the concept is the same. We perform regular backup copies of your website and save it to a safe storage area outside of your web hosting account. This way even if your entire WordPress site was to be deleted, we have a copy of it that can be restored.
We understand that business owners don’t want to be IT people. Contact OnSiteWP today to inquire how we can manage your website while you run your business.
Author: Brian Murphy
Brian Murphy is co-founder of OnSiteWP, a WordPress website maintenance company. His professional experience of working within enterprise IT, communication departments, startup companies and freelancing provides a unique, well rounded perspective on the issues business owners face.