How often do you encourage your clients to make backups?

bigredseo

HD Community Advisor
Staff member
Having sold our hosting company years ago, I now work full time in the Web Design and Marketing world - still providing very limited support for those needing to launch sites, etc, so there's a little web hosting support involved, but very little.

On a fairly regular basis, I tell my clients "now, don't forget to make a backup" or "make a backup before updating your plugins" and various other phrases. And for the most part, my clients make a backup and it's all good.

Yesterday, we had a client that we launched in February last year contact us to tell us that their site was down. It turned out that they had forgotten to pay their invoice 2 months ago and their account was now deleted. They asked if I had a backup as they didn't have one. Well, I did have one, but it was from their previous designer, a version that was hacked. I did not have a clean backup - nor does the client.

Long story short, they're building a new website with us, but it got me thinking about backups from a web hosting end of things.

How often do you tell your clients to make a backup?

I'm not talking about someone being in chat or a ticket and asking about a plugin etc, but rather, as part of your semi-regular newsletter. Do you have a "Hey, it's June 1st, have you made a backup?" section in your newsletter from time to time? If not, it might be good to include it - maybe they'll read it, maybe they won't.

In the 17 years of running our hosting company, I honestly don't recall having a notice like that too often. Sure we have gudes on how to make backups, and the buttons were in cPanel, and we made regular backups ourselves, but we didn't do much to encourage users to make their own backups.

Do you encourage your customers out of the blue?
 
I like to include automatic backups with all of our shared hosting services and VPS services, As if anything happens with their data you still get an ear full even if its in your terms.

Not just that storage these days is cheap enough to include a backup service. Also gives me peace of mind as well if a node fails I got a DRP to minimise downtime.
 
I like to include automatic backups
Yes. I think most hosts include backup of some sort these days, but my question is more about the user taking on a little more responsibility or control. Accidents happen, disks fail, and the TOS outlines responsibility, but the data is still gone.

Do you actively encourage users to make backups?
 
Its stated in our terms we are not responsible for the lose of data, the backups I take are on RAID0 storage so its not fireproof. However losing node data and backup server together would be rare i still encourage they do their own backups.
 
We use Acronis to backup all of our solutions - this has been a game changer in saving time and money.
 
We often recommend that our customers create a backup of their website after doing any significant upgrades. However, we often use automated backups for all of our clients.
 
Other than automatically backing up user data and generally advising to backup data I would never out of the blue remind a customer of doing backups, unless I am specifically working with them on a project.
 
When I was using hosting for the buisness, I also didn't do backups, no matter I knew this was neccassary :D
You basicly, hope, those things are stable and hosting company do their personal backups of their servers automaticaly
 
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