You know that depending on your webhost you might not be able to actually backup your site. It’s true. Many webhosts are simply not powerful enough to allow WordPress to back itself up because this involves backing up all the files, dumping the whole database and putting it all into one giant zip file. But luckily there are a few things to check about your webhost and you know in the next few minutes whether or not you are able to backup your site. If you aren’t I would highly recommend you move to a powerful webhost such as HostGator or Blue Host so you can now backup your site and not have to worry about it.
Make sure that your webhost charges you a monthly fee, that they use cPanel and that you are not using a reseller account which means that someone else has resold part of their space to you. Avoid free webhosts at all costs. I know it’s tempting to save those few dollars per month in order to be host for free on a site like Google Pages, Blogger.com, WordPress.com or some other free webhost. But these hosts simply are not paying the money they should to give you decent space, decent memory and decent bandwidth. Pay for a real webhost and you’ll be glad that you did. That means that the site will stay up longer, even more reliable, faster and that backups will actually run.
The next thing I would recommend you to do is to make sure that your webhost runs cPanel. It’s very easy to find out if it does. Go to whatever your site is called /cPanel and if there’s a way to log in to your website / c p a n e l. Then this means that its using the most common website back end software and that anything you run, especially if you run a backup, probably will function without any issues.
Finally be sure that your webhost is not someone else reselling their space to you. You don’t necessarily have to have a dedicated server or a vps, virtual private server, and you don’t even have to have a reseller account of your own. But if someone is reselling, for example space on HostGator it will probably be in your best interest to be simply hosted with HostGator itself so that your memory and space are not split up.
When someone hosts you on their webhost they usually make sure to give you adequate storage and memory so that your site can hold everything and runs very quickly. With a reseller account they don’t check for those things which means that one person might have enough room and space for one person. But then they will resell parts of that space to 20, 50, even 100 people and now your website runs at a slow pace and won’t actually backup or restore.
Those are some very simply checks, make sure that your webhost charges a monthly fee, runs cPanel and is not a reseller of someone else’s services.
Now that you know you can run a WordPress backup do it right now before you lose
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