Regularly back up your blog or website. Depending solely on web host can prove fatal!

This post is more on sharing thoughts on importance of periodic back up of one's website or blog beyond what is provided by the web host. I have given links at the bottom for actual back up procedure to be followed for different types of blogs/ websites.

All web hosting companies and their plans have the provision to back up your website/ blog. So, why should you bother about backing up the site separately. Why take the trouble?

First thing first. Yes, it can be cumbersome to take full back up of your site if it has become quite big and has many types of resources. But that answers the question: Whey you have a blog with just a few posts and you have not invested in special themes and plugins/ customization, you will perhaps not mind much if the blog is lost to hackers or due to a mishap in the host's location. However, when your blog or website is full of resources, its loss will be a huge setback to you. So, the botheration in backing up the blog or website, even if it looks a big bother right now, will look very small when you have the back up handy so as to put the blog/ website back to life.

And believe me, websites do crash and their data is lost or corrupted even when they are hosted on big servers and the web host has a dedicated team to look after the websites.

That was one, and the biggest, reason for a back up away from the web host. There are others. 

For example, you can have a dispute with the host and he might not cooperate in taking a copy of the entire website. 

Or, you may want to take the website to a new web host, for whatever reason. 

Or, you may need to do some upgrade - which, the way technology behaves, might lead to bugs. Will you not need a previous version of the website to restore it to a healthy state? 

People have even reported that their web host had accidentally deleted their website while doing some maintenance operation.

And the fact is that 2 out of 5 small businesses and blogs do not have any backup plan. It's not me guessing this, but has been reported on the web.

So, dear bloggers and website owner friends, back up your website on your computer or on the web. And do it regularly.

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Links that may help you in deciding how and where to back up your blog or website:

• Backing up a blogger blog (even when it is with an independent domain name but hosted on Blogger):
• What Wordpress.org tells about backing up blogs and websites which are created with Wordpress CMS and are hosted independently
• SiteGround tutorial on backing up websites using cPanel