No matter how good the technology has become in our world, accidents are prone to happen and this applies to all machineries and devices in web hosting industry. Therefore the industrial standard is only able to make any claim of uptime of up to 99.9% and not 100%. Having said that, regular backups are always strongly encouraged to prevent any unnecessary losses during any failure.

Different web hosting companies will have different set of procedures when it comes to dealing with backups for clients. However you should always make sure that they should at least have one. Some company would perform backups for their clients on daily basis. This is done through the setup of automated backup system that will ensure all parts of files will be saved as their latest revision point for recovery. Others would backup more specifically for disaster recovery.

No matter what backup services that are offered by your web hosting provider, it is always important to remember that backing up your files is your own responsibility. There are some paid services to carry out more frequent backup for your files and you may feel safer to do so. However, it is always best to have the backup store by yourself. There are two types of backup modes that is usually done. One is known as the online backup or some would call it as hot backup and that is when files are being backup online. The other is known as offline backup and also known as cold backup.

If you have any critical data such as pictures, videos or other files, always ensure that you never use a web hosting server alone to backup the data. Doing an offline backup by yourself could save you from headache if your hosting server is down or even if you are not able to connect to the Internet. But you would still have what you need with you. So save all your critical files into your external hard drive always. If possible, you might want to separate the backup work in a weekly or daily manner if you have updates from time to time.