Jong’s blog went offline for several days only to go back online with most of his archives gone, vanished to oblivion. It could have been prevented. Here are several things you might keep in mind to prevent such tragedy to happen with your blog:
- Backup. This is the single most important step. There are half a dozen ways to do this. Your cPanel has one, use it and download a full copy. If you know your way around phpMyAdmin, export all the databases into a zip file and keep a copy in your local PC. This is a good method if you have other scripts installed, like a photogallery or WordPress hacks and plugins that use the database. Install a WordPress DB backup plugin (if you are running WP). This way you can download a backup everyday with little or no effort at all.
- Maintain a list of emails from all your commenters. This way, they can be emailed about what happened to your blog if ever that dreaded day arrives. Your regular readers may want to know about it asap.
- Talk to your host about their redundancy strategy. If they have several servers, you can request your backup be restored into another live server.
- Find a backup host. This is important if your current provider is just a reseller or has only one server. If you have a local back-up with you, they should be able to restore your blog in no time. Our record time for restoring blogs is 15 mins.
- Get a personal domain as you can take this from one provider to another. A subdomain accout may get you in trouble because the URL tied up with your provider.
- Edit your blog theme locally and upload it to your host. That way you always have the latest revisions, mods and hacks in your PC and not in the server.
This topic is quite hot on the Internet right now. What do you pay the most attention to when choosing what to write ?
@ Manuel
Yes, we do have automatic full backup on a daily basis. We have weekly/monthly backups too.
On occassion, we also copy backups across all servers just for extra redundancy.
@ Jong
Hey, it was actually yours. :) I read your blog thru my feedreaders so I wasn’t able to double-check.
@ Alfie
Yes, we have had our share of mishaps in the past and that gave us the lesson to make extra redundant backups. Likewise, we also advise clients to do their own manual backups on top of ours.
@ Bimbo
Yup, it’s automated via cron job.
@ The Ca t
Thanks for the vote of confidence. :)
kaya ploghost pa rin ako kahit I can get webhosting dito sa States.
may automatic back-up ako.
hey abe, good advice, happened to me a couple of times though not to my blog…..yet.
now i back up religiously. how do you back up the entire home directory using cron by the way?
thanks!
alfie,
hehe actually two hosting companies experienced that at the same time hehe. one who host my blog and the other one is also a pinoy hosting company… grrr i might try ploghost when mine expires. :)
I think I know who host his blog.
Recently, while looking for a good web host (aside from bloghost – promote,promote), I was end up reading a support forum of one of a Philippine base hosting company. Members are fighting back against the webhost who, “unintentionally” lost their database after a long data center server down time.
I also have a, not so, bad experience with ploghost (sorry abe, just want to be transparent) last March or February when I lost a small portion of my database after a datacenter server down time. But that was long time ago and thanks God, it never happened again. Ploghost for me is still one of the best webhost.
jaypee’s blog? akin yata po un? kase site ko un lumalabas? hehe nagcrash din un akin. nakakainis. ngayon natuto na ako.i make sure na magback up ako everytime na may changes akong ginawa… thanks sa tips
Does Ploghost automatically back-up the blogs of its web tenants?