A hosting company once took my client's online shop offline with no warning.
No notice. No reason. Nobody answering the phone. And when I finally reached a person, they would not give me a copy of the website.
First, two words, in case they are new to you.
Hosting is the rented computer your website sits on. Someone else owns it. You pay every month for your site to live there, the way you would rent a shop unit.
A backup is a spare copy of your website, kept somewhere safe, so you can put the site back if the first copy is lost.
This shop sold things online. Every order, every customer, every product was in that one place. It was how the business earned its money.
What saved it
The company had blocked the website, but not the files.
I could still reach the computer a different way, so I pulled everything down: all the files, and the database too. (The database is the part that holds your orders, customers and prices. The files are the pictures, pages and code. You need both.)
Then I put it all back together on my own computer and checked it, bit by bit, before touching anything real. Products there. Orders there. Customers there.
Then I rented space with a different company, put the checked copy there, and pointed the web address at the new home. The shop was back, and nothing was lost.
Why I am not proud of it
It worked. But I want to be honest about why it worked.
They locked one door and forgot another. If they had locked both, there was no copy of that business anywhere else in the world. That was luck, not planning.
So the first thing I did afterwards was set up copies that save themselves, somewhere else entirely. Not on that computer. Not with that company. Not depending on anyone being kind.
The question worth asking
If your website matters to your business, ask whoever looks after it one question:
If our hosting company disappeared tomorrow, where is our backup?
There are only a few answers you will get.
- "The hosting company has it." Then you do not have a backup. You have a hope. The thing that fails in a hosting problem is the hosting.
- "There's a plugin that does it." (A plugin is a small add-on that gives a website an extra feature.) Fine. But where does it put the copy? If it puts it on the same computer, see above.
- "It goes somewhere we control, and I put one back recently to check." That is a backup.
That last part matters more than people expect. A copy nobody has ever put back is not a backup. It is a file nobody has ever opened. The first time you find out whether it works should not be the day you need it.
What it costs
Less than most owners think. For a small business site, keeping copies somewhere else costs a few dollars a month, and setting it up takes an afternoon, once.
Compare that with building your shop again from memory and screenshots.