Neglect is in the air. In a rather unusual streak, not just one but three of our past clients lost their websites recently because they didn’t renew their hosting packages. For the oldest one that was built with plain HTML, we had a backup copy in our cloud archive, and we could fix the problem by merely uploading the files. Lucky for our client, we happened to have them; that certainly isn’t the case for many websites that are over 5 or 6 years old. Most modern websites, however, are built using a CMS, or a Content Management System. Popular CMSes include WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Ruby on Rails, with WordPress being the most popular of all. The upside of a CMS is that you can globally change elements of your website in an instant, or add pages without doing any laborious coding. The downside is that you can’t simply upload the files to the server and expect it to work again.
Whenever we create a WordPress website, we keep a current copy of all the website’s files on our own local computers. But WordPress also requires a database to work properly, and that database is updated every time you make any change to your WordPress website. And while most website developers will download the WordPress database periodically, it’s simply impractical to download a copy of the database every single time you make a change to the website.
The fact is, if you let your hosting package expire, your web host will generally wait a few days and then delete your website for good. By all means, call your web host and plead with them to help you. This is the easiest way to solve the problem, but be forewarned that there is a very limited window for restoring files and content, so don’t delay.
How to Prevent
For our WordPress websites, we’ve adopted the implementation of the UpDraftPlus plugin as a standard part of our process. UpDraftPlus is a free plugin that lets you back up your WordPress website in a number of ways: either saving it on your server, emailing it to you, or saving it to a remote location on Dropbox, for example. You can take a backup whenever you want, or you can set up the plugin to automatically take a backup on a schedule. One other advantage: UpDraftPlus is one of those plugins that’s not very likely to conflict with other plugins, so you can feel pretty safe installing it and updating it, even if you’re not a WordPress expert.
Every time we make a major change to a website we manage, we’ll take a manual backup of the website—which includes the all-important WordPress database—using UpDraftPlus. If you’re managing your WordPress website yourself, we recommend that you do the same. If you select the options to back up your files and your database, your website can be completely restored using your UpDraftPlus backup file… as long as you save the backup to your computer or Dropbox. If the backup is on your hosting server and your server gets wiped out, it won’t do you any good. So do that. You may need a web developer’s help to get back up and running, but it’s a lot easier and less expensive than recreating the website from scratch.
How to Never Let Your Hosting Package Expire Ever Again
But here’s our hot, hot tip. Set up a calendar reminder to renew your hosting package 11 months from your last renewal date. That’s right—one month early. Include your host’s name, your username, and your password in that calendar reminder, so you don’t even have to look it up when the calendar alert pops up. If you call up your host, there may even be a discount available for renewing early. That never happens when you renew precisely on time.
Lost your website recently? Contact us—we might be able to help. At the very least, we can stop it from happening to you in the future.
