Open Source Activism

Website backups go hand in had with security. They are security for a disaster or if you website gets hacked. You should make regular backups of your website. This applies not only to websites, but blogs, Joomla and Mediawiki sites.

Most hosting companies do not do backups for you. They backup the server installation, but leave you on your own for your blog. The better hosting companies will do periodic backups of your websites. If anyone know hosting companies that do or don’t provide backups please add them in the comments. I am talking about the basic hosting services that many bloggers and simple websites use. Siteground does weekly backups, while Hostmonster, Dreamhost, and Cyberwurx do not.

To do a backup, you usually have 2 options with most hosting company control panels. These 2 methods are as follows:

1. Full backup of your entire site
   • Includes your website, database and home directory files
   • Options:
     1. Save this to your local computer
     2. Backup locally on the hosting server and then download when complete
2. Separate backups for your database and your website
   • Run this after you add plugins, themes, images, podcasts, videos or other files on your website
   • Backup your database on a more regular basis

My recommendations for backups would be to do a full backup after you have your website completely setup and then again once a quarter. I would then recommend doing a website only backup monthly unless you make many changes to your website on a regular basis. This does not count frequent posting updates. I would then do the website backup at least weekly or whenever a large number of changes are made. Lastly, I would recommend backup up the database at least weekly. If you post multiple times a day you may want to make backups daily or find a service that does it for you.

To make these backups faster, more reliable, and quickly accessible, allow the backups to run locally on the hosting server. When it is complete, download them to you local computer.

Last week, I was working with a gentleman who purchased a domain name that was registered at Valueweb.com. The process was atrocious. First the seller had to fax information to Valueweb since they don’t have a transfer method online. Once the domain ownership was supposedly transfered, the passwords and auth codes were still on the account of the seller. Valueweb never did split the sold domain off into a separate. The seller and myself both made several phone calls to get this straightened out, or so we thought.

Once I had access to the account, assuming it was separated, I changed passwords and contact information. In addition, I had to call them to change nameservers, that too is not available online. These calls took place on Monday.

Today, the buyer starts receiving emails about other domains expiring on the account. Valueweb had only split the account into a sub account of the sellers account and not into its own account. Again, the seller and I spent time on the phone and in emails with Valueweb straightening out this mess.

After a couple hours of phone calls and emails the buyer now has a separate account containing the one domain or at least I think so. This afternoon I started the process of transferring the domain to GoDaddy.

I would never recommend using Valueweb for any domain purchases. With their customer service this horrendous with just a domain transfer, I’d hate to see what their hosting services were like. I don’t ever plan on finding out.

On my last phone call today, I discovered, Valueweb is now owned by Domain People. I have not had any experience with them at this time. If anyone from Domain People reads this, please fix Valueweb if you want to keep any customers.