Don't Use Your Web Hosting For Remote Backup A few words of caution for those of us who back up to our web servers.	Visited: 749 5.0/5.0 (1 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Patrick Jobin October 06, 2009

Despite the wide availability of high-quality online backup services, many people today still feel the need to use their web servers as a remote backup device. Although it may seem convenient enough, this impromptu method of data protection has a lot of drawbacks when it comes to speed, security and reliability.

Before you start uploading the contents of your hard drive, there are a few things you’ll want to keep in mind:

• Most web hosts have explicit policies forbidding the use of your account for backup. Using your web server as a backup device could lead to having all of your sites shut down without notice.
• You could suddenly have your account shut down in the event that you upload copyrighted material to your server.
• Depending on your hosting account, there might be upload/download limits. This type of activity could also get your account suspended or terminated.

Of course, those are only some of the more serious reasons why you shouldn’t back up to your web server. Dedicated online backup services also have more practical advantages over this method:

• Many online backup services provide advanced encryption features that protect your confidential information during transfer and storage. FTP, on the other hand, is not a secure protocol. If you’re uploading important data, your transmissions will be exposed to potential hackers. Also, once uploaded to your server, your data will potentially be freely available to anyone on the internet.
• Online backup services typically perform block-level uploads containing only the changed portions of your files. This way, only a tiny percentage of your hard drive is uploaded instead of the entire thing.
• The faster upload times provided by dedicated online backup services also mean less bandwidth usage, faster recovery time, and shorter backup windows.
• Unlike this do-it-yourself FTP backup approach, a proper online backup solution allows you to store multiple file “versions”, so that you can recover from a previous point in time in case of a virus or corrupted file.

The demand for online backup has grown so much in recent years that many web hosts today also offer it as an additional service. Talk to your hosting provider about online backup today. You might even be able to get a discount by bundling this service with your current hosting account.

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