Hosting Lessons: Backups are not necessarily so wonderful

by Sapphire (November 7, 2007)

I rarely ask for support from hosts. I check everything in my power, do research online, etc., to avoid having to ask them for help. Why? Here’s an example.

Once upon a time, Sapphire was having a little problem with a site. She read and she studied and she asked friends, but she could not figure it out. Finally, she asked Host Charming if he would look into it and see if he could tell what was causing the problem, which had been going on for about 24 hours.

“No problem,” said Host Charming. And without another thought, he installed a 36-hour old backup on her beautiful site, wiping out 36 hours’ worth of posts and comments from visitors. Why? He never gave a reason. It didn’t help a thing. She’d asked for him to take a look and see if anything jumped out at him. Instead, he did this other thing.

Sapphire was very, very angry and so forever after, when she asked for Host Charming’s help, she prefaced her tickets with something like “Please, whatever you do DO NOT INSTALL A BACKUP OVER MY SITE without contacting me first like you did that one time.” And she configured her site to send her database backups every two freakin’ hours (before, it had been daily, but even that backup was about 20 hours old when this happened) even though that wastes a lot of resources because she could never again trust Host Charming. (Later, she sent the Great Dragon to toast him, and everyone else lived happily ever after.)

The moral of the story is: host techies can be lazy. Unless you’ve dealt with them before and know them to be seriously communicative and on the ball, do NOT tell them things like, “It was working yesterday”, or they may think, “Aha! Reinstalling backup = one button push + coffee break, while serious diagnosis = at least 5 minutes of work. I choose option 1!”

Since then, I’ve also made sure to use tech support at least once, early on, when I have all my sites backed up and am ready to relocate instantly if they should blow up my site on the first ticket. I hate to waste their time, but I usually find something that only takes a good host tech person about 5 minutes to figure out. Then I know they actually looked at what they were supposed to, instead of reading my ticket and thinking, “Now, how do I close this with virtually no effort?”

The other moral of the story is: daily backups sound like more than enough until you have to use one and realize just how active your site is. Take notice of how many visitor posts or comments you get in a day. If there are new ones throughout the day, it’s really worth doing a backup every couple of hours.

Posted in Hosting
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