“A colleague just called and told me her website had been hacked. It was now all in French and only the home page was visible. She has no back up and warned me to find out if I have one. Do I?
I just took some screen shots of the pages – but does BlueHost – or do you – keep a backup in case I were to be hacked too? Just wondering….”
Imagine you spent several weeks writing and honing the text and choosing just the right images for your web site, only to lose it overnight to a hacker months later. The above message is an actual email I received this week, and a perfect opportunity to discuss what Bluehost, Perugi Design and you can do to protect your web site and restore it to its original state. Whether your site is old or new, you want to keep text, posts and images for the next iteration, so you won’t have to recreate the wheel again.
For starters, Bluehost, amazingly, backs all sites on its servers every day… for free. I must admit, I have had to rely on them a few times when a site was lost. One client forgot his dashboard password and instead of submitting for a new password at the login page, he went into Bluehost and reinstalled WordPress. Yikes! But, that’s a story for another day. Not every hosting company does this for free. Not even Go Daddy. However, Bluehost asks that you arrange for additional backup as well, just in case.
The minimal approach
You could copy and paste the text into a text editor. But, that does not protect the theme layout and code installed with WordPress. Instead, try this. Go onto the dashboard and to the Tools button on the side bar. Hit the Export button. That will download an xml file of your site. Keep this somewhere safe inside a folder, but not on the desktop.
Amazon S3 backup in the cloud
Perugi Design also offers regular monthly backup to Amazon as a yearly service. The tool we use also allows us to clean out spam comments, update your plugins on a weekly basis and check for malware monthly. Ask us for more information.
So, if you are hacked and your site is in French and all but gone, don’t fret. Bluehost can restore the site to a previous week. It’s a good idea to ask also your web developer to look for possible weaknesses in the site and check for malware.