Where Do Your Backups Live?
NATIONAL PREPAREDNESS MONTH
It is National Preparedness Month, and on the Gulf Coast that is not a poster in a break room. It is a calendar item.
Most Houston businesses have a plan for the building. Far fewer have a plan for the website, and the website is where your phone number, your hours, your forms and your reputation live. Here is the question worth answering this week: if your site went down today, who restores it, and how long does that take?
Your website is not at your office, but your recovery plan might be
Your website does not live at your office. That part surprises people less than it used to. What still surprises them is everything that does live at the office.
The only copy of the logo files. The spreadsheet with the domain registrar login. The laptop that has the FTP credentials saved. The one person who knows which plugin breaks the checkout if it updates.
A storm does not have to take your server down to take your business offline. It only has to take out the person and the machine that know how to fix things.
Five ways website backups quietly fail
Backups fail in boring, predictable ways, and almost always the same five.
Nobody ever restored one. A backup you have never tested is a hope, not a backup. The first time you find out the database export was incomplete should not be the day you need it.
The backup lives on the same server as the site. If the server is the problem, so is the backup. Off server copies exist for exactly this reason.
The schedule does not match the business. A weekly backup on a store that takes orders every day means you can lose six days of orders. Match the frequency to what you would actually miss.
Retention is too short. Some problems are found weeks later, especially a quiet content change or an injected script. Seven days of history will not reach back far enough.
One person holds everything. If exactly one human can log in, you do not have a recovery plan. You have a single point of failure who also takes vacations.
Why we keep hosting in house
This is the part of the job nobody notices when it is done right, which is why we keep it in house rather than handing it to a third party. Our web hosting sits on our own servers, monitored by the same team that builds the sites, so there is nobody to point at when something breaks at 2 AM.
That matters more than it sounds. When hosting is a separate vendor, an outage becomes an argument. The host says it is the code. The developer says it is the server. You sit in the middle losing business while two companies email each other.
It also matters for speed. Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor and a conversion factor, and hosting is where a lot of that is won or lost. Our hosting plans are built to meet those targets rather than to win a price comparison.
The five questions worth answering this week
You do not need an enterprise continuity plan. You need answers to five questions, written down somewhere other than one person’s memory.
Most owners can answer two of the five. The gap is usually the same: nobody has tested a restore, and the domain registrar login is a mystery. Both are fixable in an afternoon, and both are much harder to fix during an actual emergency.
If you are not sure where your site is hosted or who controls your domain, that is a normal place to start and not an embarrassing one. We untangle it regularly as part of web development work, and it is often the first thing we find when a new client comes to us after an outage.
Your website preparedness checklist
- Who restores the site if it goes down, and how long does that take
- Where do the backups live, and are they on a different server than the site
- How far back does backup history reach
- Has anyone ever actually tested a restore
- Who besides one person has the hosting and domain registrar logins
- Where are the original logo and brand files stored
- Is your domain set to auto renew, and is the contact email one you still read
Storm season is the deadline, not the project
Storm season is the deadline, not the project. The project is knowing that your site, your domain and your data are recoverable by more than one person, on a schedule that matches how much business you would lose.
If you want a second set of eyes on it, a free website audit covers speed, structure and the technical basics, and we will tell you what we find whether or not you hire us. If you would rather just talk it through, contact our Houston team and ask about hosting.
Frequently Asked Questions
Match the schedule to what you would miss. A brochure site that changes monthly can run weekly backups. A store taking orders daily should be backed up daily, because the real cost is the orders and customer records you cannot recover.
Somewhere other than the server running the site. If the server is what failed, a backup sitting on it fails with it. Off server storage, with enough retention to reach back past a problem you did not notice right away, is the standard to aim for.
It depends on what the plan actually includes and how far back it reaches. Ask three things: how often, how long it is kept, and how you request a restore. Then ask them to restore a copy to a test location so you have seen it work once.
If your site is hosted properly it stays online, because it is not running out of your office. The risk is the people and files on your end: the logins, the original image files, and the one person who knows how everything is wired together.
Whoever controls the registrar account, which is not always the business that paid for it. Check now rather than during an emergency. If a former vendor holds it, transferring it takes days and requires their cooperation.
Yes, mostly through speed and uptime. Core Web Vitals are a measurable ranking factor, and a site that is slow or intermittently down loses both rankings and conversions. Hosting is one of the few technical levers that moves both at once.
Related Pages
- Web Hosting – In house Houston hosting built to meet Core Web Vitals targets
- Web Design Houston – Design and rebuild work from the same in house team
- Services – Everything Vertical Web delivers, all of it in house
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