Imagine this, you’re sitting at home and you get a phone call from one of your customers asking if you’re still in business. “Of course” you reply, and your customer lets you into why they thought this… Your website is down. Like completely down. No home page, no contact page. Nothing. Actually, there’s something… some ads for an international clothing store. But you didn’t put it there. How did it get there? The inevitable has happened. Your website has been hacked. There are two ways this could play out, and we’re going to walk you through both scenarios. We’ll leave it up to you to decide which you’d prefer in this situation and whether you think a website backup is necessary.
1. You don’t have a website backup.
“What’s a website backup?” and “how do I make a backup?” are the thoughts that have run through your mind many of times, yet you’ve never taken the time to ask about them, or find out how to create a backup. Because you don’t have a backup available you can’t simply log into your website hosting and restore your website from it. Unfortunately, in this case, you would need to re-develop your website from scratch. Which could cost you thousands if you need to hire a professional, or tens to hundreds of hours if you’ve opted to design your website yourself.
2. You do have a backup available.
“A website backup… I have so many in place” you think to yourself! You grab the most recent one, upload it to your website hosting and start the restore process. Or simply call your website designer and forward through the backup files, and leave them to work their magic. In less than an hour, your website should be back up and running like nothing ever happened. Once restored, you will need to harden the security measures that are in place to ensure the site can’t get hacked again, or at least not from the same vulnerability.
What else do you need to know? Some website development companies, like ourselves, offer automatic backups so we essentially set up an automated system to work in the background so you don’t have to worry about not having a backup. Our system will run on a schedule to back up your website every day, week or month depending on your site and your business needs. We also send these backups to a separate server such as Google Drive. This helps your contingency plan because if your website was hacked and all your backups were only on your server, there’s basically no point in having a backup to begin with because they are unlikely to be accessible.
Your website is essentially your shop front, it needs to be looked after. If you’d like to talk to us about our backup and maintenance plans or a security audit please contact us today.
