Let's start with the most important thing: It is wise to back up your site regularly and also have a version of the website that is not with us but entirely in your own possession
What is the most convenient way to arrange your backups?
Cloud86 makes standard backups of your entire hosting package. This ensures that all sites under your hosting package are backed up and can be restored as a whole. However, you can also choose to restore individual individual elements from your hosting package, such as:
- Sites
- Mail accounts
- Domains or files
- Databases
- SSL/TLS certificates
Restoring these backups can be managed in Plesk. See Restore backup via Plesk.
Backups via WordPress Plugins?
It is always good to keep a backup of your website locally on your computer, but we do not recommend making many backups within your website. If you want to do it, we recommend running the backup of the entire website no more often than once a week, backup of the database is best done more often.
An example of a backup plugin is UpdraftPlus - Backup/Restore. The advantage of this plugin is that the you can also have the data backed up to an external storage such as Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox or an FTP/SFTP server.
Note: As mentioned above, backups via a plugin do count against your disk space if you store them with us and may come at the cost of your package speed.
Here's a practical example of what we sometimes see happen:
We have a WordPress website that is 1GB in size without a backup, we install the Updraft plugin and start making backups. To ensure that we always have a good backup, we also install another backup plugin. This backup plugin creates backups of the website, but also includes the backups from Updraft mentioned above in these backups. After one week, we check again, and the same website that was originally 1GB in size, has now grown to 25GB, including all backups.
This is obviously a waste of space and also unnecessary as Cloud86 already creates preventative backups of your website.
Creating manual backups
If you want to manually backup a website you will always have to check if the website has a database linked to it in addition to files. To make a manual WordPress backup you can use the following article: How do I backup my WordPress website? If you are using another CMS then you can follow the same steps to backup the files and if it has a database attached to it you should include that as well.
If you need some help, you can always reach our support desk by email support@cloud86.io and on weekdays from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm you can also reach us by phone and via the chat in My Cloud86.