Having sold our hosting company years ago, I now work full time in the Web Design and Marketing world - still providing very limited support for those needing to launch sites, etc, so there's a little web hosting support involved, but very little.
On a fairly regular basis, I tell my clients "now, don't forget to make a backup" or "make a backup before updating your plugins" and various other phrases. And for the most part, my clients make a backup and it's all good.
Yesterday, we had a client that we launched in February last year contact us to tell us that their site was down. It turned out that they had forgotten to pay their invoice 2 months ago and their account was now deleted. They asked if I had a backup as they didn't have one. Well, I did have one, but it was from their previous designer, a version that was hacked. I did not have a clean backup - nor does the client.
Long story short, they're building a new website with us, but it got me thinking about backups from a web hosting end of things.
How often do you tell your clients to make a backup?
I'm not talking about someone being in chat or a ticket and asking about a plugin etc, but rather, as part of your semi-regular newsletter. Do you have a "Hey, it's June 1st, have you made a backup?" section in your newsletter from time to time? If not, it might be good to include it - maybe they'll read it, maybe they won't.
In the 17 years of running our hosting company, I honestly don't recall having a notice like that too often. Sure we have gudes on how to make backups, and the buttons were in cPanel, and we made regular backups ourselves, but we didn't do much to encourage users to make their own backups.
Do you encourage your customers out of the blue?
On a fairly regular basis, I tell my clients "now, don't forget to make a backup" or "make a backup before updating your plugins" and various other phrases. And for the most part, my clients make a backup and it's all good.
Yesterday, we had a client that we launched in February last year contact us to tell us that their site was down. It turned out that they had forgotten to pay their invoice 2 months ago and their account was now deleted. They asked if I had a backup as they didn't have one. Well, I did have one, but it was from their previous designer, a version that was hacked. I did not have a clean backup - nor does the client.
Long story short, they're building a new website with us, but it got me thinking about backups from a web hosting end of things.
How often do you tell your clients to make a backup?
I'm not talking about someone being in chat or a ticket and asking about a plugin etc, but rather, as part of your semi-regular newsletter. Do you have a "Hey, it's June 1st, have you made a backup?" section in your newsletter from time to time? If not, it might be good to include it - maybe they'll read it, maybe they won't.
In the 17 years of running our hosting company, I honestly don't recall having a notice like that too often. Sure we have gudes on how to make backups, and the buttons were in cPanel, and we made regular backups ourselves, but we didn't do much to encourage users to make their own backups.
Do you encourage your customers out of the blue?