How not to lose your website

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A client once asked me if he could store important documents on his website.

“You mean using it like a hard drive?” I asked.

He said yes. He wanted to store all his important documents on his website securely without keeping any backups anywhere else. Well, you can guess what I told him.

But just in case you can’t guess, I’ll tell you: No. No way. No way in hell.

As a general rule, you should back everything up, even your website itself. It is possible to lose your entire website and never get it back if you’re not careful. Don’t laugh, this has happened to several people we know over the years. OK, you can laugh a little bit.

Here’s usually how it goes down:

1. Your cousin is learning how to build web pages and thinks he can make a few cool changes to your site.

2. Your cousin accidentally overwrites the whole site and moves back home with your aunt for protection.

3. You contact your hosting company to see if they backed it up.

4. The hosting company tells you that you’re on their super-cheap plan that doesn’t include automatic backups.

5. You hold out your palm, place your face in it and groan liberally.

This is the technological equivalent of getting so hammered that you can’t find your car in the morning and are forced to drop a few grand on a new one. Except perhaps that losing your car like that is a crazy enough story to make you the hit at parties. Losing your website is just as terrible, but so much more boring.

Here are tips to avoid losing a website:

1. Make sure your site is being handled by people who know what they’re doing.

2. Backup your site on your own computer by downloading all the source files periodically. To do this, you’ll need an FTP client. Then you log on to your site, copy all the files and save them to your computer.

3. Get a good hosting company that automatically makes backups of your website.

That’s basically it. Three simple steps to keep your website from drifting off into the ether of the internet.