You hear about hosts offering backup services, and you hear people say that it’s important to back your site up often. But why? Even when you have a managed server, it’s always a good idea to run backups of your own, and save them on your own computer. While no host, including us, wants something bad to happen, computers are computers, and by their very nature, anything can happen.

If you back your data up often, and if something happens, you will be less likely to lose critical data, such as blog posts, forum posts, and so forth. If you back these things up, and your server should crash for whatever reason, the worst that will happen is that you will have to re-install your applications and databases. If you don’t back things up, however, you’ll need to start from scratch, and that would be a disaster for a business site.

There are numerous scripts available that will automatically back your databases up and e-mail them to you. At that point, you can simply save them in a specific area on your computer. The same goes for other data. If nothing else, you can manually backup your images, .htaccess files, and other critical data. This way, if the worst happens, you can be back up and running with minimal delay.

It’s important to remember that there’s no such thing as being too cautious. Back up every day at least. It’s better to be overprepared than it is to be underprepared, especially when it comes to critical data such as databases, and especially when those databases contain vital customer information.

Palladium Hosting provides all of its clients with access to backup functionality within their cPanel control panels allowing you to backup your databases and home directories directly to your desktop with a few simple clicks.