Backups

We take a full backup of every hosting site weekly and keep it for at least four weeks. This article explains what those backups are for, and what you should back up yourself.

What we back up

Weekly, the website's files and every database.
Backups are kept for at least four weeks.
A backup is a single .tar.gz file holding the files and an SQL dump of every database. It can be restored anywhere, with us or elsewhere.

What they are for

Our weekly backups are for disaster recovery: so that we can restore the whole service after an outage. Under the Terms of Service we do not undertake individual restores on request. Backing up your own data is your responsibility, and we give you the tools for it.

Taking and downloading your own backup

Open the site and go to the Backups tab.

Back up now: asks for a backup straight away, one per hour. It is ready within a few minutes.
Download: downloads any backup to your own computer.

Good practice:

Before any bigger change (an update, a new plugin, a move), take a backup and download it.
Download a fresh backup regularly and keep a copy somewhere other than with us.
If your website changes a lot (a shop taking orders, for example), also use an application-level backup that saves changes more often to external storage.

A deleted database

Separately from backups, a deleted database can be restored for 30 days on the Databases tab. See Creating and using databases.

Virtual servers

We do not back up virtual servers; backing them up is entirely up to you. See Upgrades, backups and firewalls on a virtual server.