Just to be proactive here in light of the recent MySQL crash that caused a bit of a stir internally at a site that I frequent (not a client of mine, just a site that I visit as a user). But it begged the question: are routine backups in place with your website hosting company?

In my experience, I have found that a lot of webmasters do not realize that most hosts do not automatically backup customer websites and databases. Clients often assume wrongly that their stuff is being backed up but then it usually is not. At least not unless an extra fee is paid (usually) which depends on the size of the data being backed up.

I would strongly encourage and recommend that webmasters reading this address this issue with their host(s) ASAP. Though it is rare, a MySQL crash could/can corrupt the database. Also, there is all the HTML pages and scripts which hopefully are being backed up regularly.  I’d hate to see the hard work of people go down the tubes because of an internal (hosting) or external (hacker) problem.

Also, there are monitoring programs and scripts that can be utilyzed to notify webmasters when there are problems with their site so they can review and take necessary action to repair (or so the programs can automatically repair).

So, webmasters reading this — check with your host ASAP about backups and proactive measures against the loss of data and downtime. If you aren’t doing these backups regularly yourself then you could be very sorry someday. Last week I know one webmaster, in fact, who lost all of his sites (dozens of them) because neither he nor his host was backing up the data. Yes, he had some of it locally backed up but if it had been tarred up he could have been back and running with very little downtime.

The last Friday of every calendar year, starting with 2003, we have declared this last Friday the Official Backup Day at Script School. At the very, very, very least one day a year dragging out all those discs and burning backups is necessary.

Did this post make you go hmm?

 Loading ...

• One of our dedicated servers HD went down [site news]
• How to access MySQL from Windows Command Prompt
• mySQL and Pogo team up on Linux package
• Encrypt your PHP scripts
• Can’t access CD or DVD data?
• How to keep track of your website uptime with Pingdom GIGRIB