So, with a little bit of effort database backups can be automated and stored remotely completely free of charge on Google’s servers. What if you’re looking for an even easier solution to backing up your WordPress installations?
With the WordPress Database Backup Plugin and your handy-dandy GMail or GoogleMail account, you can automate the regular backup of your WordPress database along with any additional plugin schema/data you might installed.
Of course, reliable web hosting always helps to do be sure to drop by Hosts League and let other people know whether your web host is reliable or not.
In other news today, WordPress 2.7 draws ever closer with the release of 2.7 Beta 3. From the looks of these beta releases, v2.7 is going to make a killer app even more deadly. We’re talking Man with the Golden Gun deadly. Well, up until the point he gets killed although I suppose you can’t get much more deadly than that!
cPanel offers a very useful backup facility, but nothing much in the way of scheduled or automated backup. Whilst managing regular backups for a single website can become a repetitive chore, carrying out the same procedure for multiple websites becomes a much greater burden and that often means that it won’t get done.
So what happens when your hosting server fails for some reason and you website is not only down, but your data and files are at risk of corruption too?
There’s no doubt about it, a well-thought out backup plan can be a real life-saver when stuff hits the fan and whilst the likes of the Ensim hosting control panel allow a complete reseller account backup, this doesn’t exist at the reseller level for cPanel.
As a WHM root user, local and remote backups can be easily automated. As a cPanel reseller, your solutions don’t come as easy. However, I’ve recently ordered and am currently testing out CP Site Saver as a desktop-based backup utility for cPanel hosted websites. Basically, you provide the application with details about each of the websites and database you want to backup including scheduling details it will then carry out the backups as specified using the built-in cPanel backup functionality.
So far, after a couple of days, it’s low price certainly seems to offer excellent protection from a potentially crippling situation.
Don’t imagine that web hosting disasters only happen to other people as yet another host I’ve had dealings with has just spent the best part of a week trying to recover from a hard disk that failed during the scheduled backup. Unfortunately, the backup was set-up to overwrite the previous backup and the disk failure resulted in a corrupted backup. The host in question is yet another to have to learn the hard way about the importance of a well thought out backup process. Is your host going to be next?
Perhaps you’ve seen some likely victims already, but haven’t really paid much attention or even registered the fact because you’re not looking for them. Some businesses are much more susceptible to identitiy theft than others and it doesn’t take a genuis hacker to glean off more than enough information to make a social engineering attack seem much more likely to succeed.
Yes, you may have hardened locks, bullet-proof glass, CCTV, ninja guards, savage dogs or killer bees for protection from the bad element, but what protection do you have in place when it comes to disclosure policies in the workplace or even the home?
Depending on what circles you go around in, you might see regular occurrences of people opening themselves just wide enough for someone to apply some leverage. A prime example of victims in the waiting are Internet marketers who often emblazen their signatures on their websites for all to see as a symbolic gesture of endorsing one’s belief in the punted product and/or service.
If you’ve ever tried to register a domain name then you’ll probably already be aware of the WHOIS service. This is query that you can perform against any domain name in order to find out who is the legal registrant, their address, telephone numbers and email address. Did I mention that this service is freely accessible from countless websites? You can even run desktop applications that will perform WHOIS queries or install freely available scripts onto your website to do the same.
The point is that this information is easily accessible unless measures are taken to hide the registrant; e.g. Nominet, the registry for .uk domain names offers the ability to hide information about the registrant of a domain when a WHOIS enquery is executed against a .uk domain. Some domain registrars also provide a privacy service whereby they will hide the actual registration information by replacing it with their own. As the registrant, you could simply use false information to register your domain, but that just wouldn’t be right would it…
So, back to Internet marketers and their habit of signing their websites. Combine a true-to-life image of someone’s signature and combine it with their name, address, telephone/fax numbers, email addresses (perhaps even more if you’ve access to their personal blogs) and you’ve got yourself a recipe for identity theft. You can almost picture it like an epsiode of CSI!