Website Backups

Each of our hosting products comes complete with free website backups. The details of how backups work are slightly different dependent on the hosting plan:

Professional Hosting

  • Weekly backups are taken by default. The exact day is varied across accounts, please contact support to review when your site is backed up, or indeed alter it.
  • Daily backups are available as a paid upgrade from £2.50 per month.
  • Backups are taken between 12am and 6am - the time varies day to day based on the processing load for our backup services.
  • Backups are stored for 28 days (both daily and weekly). We retain 28 copies for daily backups and 4 copies for weekly backups. The newest backup continually over writing the oldest.
  • Backup restores must be requested via support.
  • Backups contain SQL dumps of all databases and the contents of /var/www/vhosts/DOMAIN, excluding any statistics or log files.

WordPress Hosting

  • Daily backups as standard.
  • Backups are taken between 12am and 6am - the time varies day to day based on the processing load for our backup services.
  • Backups are stored for 28 days. We retain 28 copies, the newest backup continually over writing the oldest.
  • Backup restores must be requested via support.
  • Backups contain SQL dumps of all databases, /httpdocs and /wp-content. As it is unnecessary, we do not backup /wp.

Universal Hosting & Reseller Hosting

  • Daily backups as standard.
  • Backups are taken between 12am and 6am - the time varies day to day based on the processing load for our backup services.
  • Backups are stored for 28 days. We retain 28 copies, the newest backup continually over writing the oldest.
  • Backup restores must be requested via support.
  • Backups contain SQL dumps of all databases and the contents of /var/www/vhosts/DOMAIN, excluding any statistics or log files.

Email Backups - Mercury

  • Email backups for all account types are taken independently of the actual account backup mentioned above.
  • We keep a backup of all mail accounts taken every 6 hours for 1 day.
  • We keep a daily backup of all mail accounts for 30 days.

Snapshots - take control of your offline backups and data recovery

  • Professional Hosting, Universal Hosting, Reseller Hosting & WordPress Hosting accounts come with the 34SP snapshots feature.
  • Take a snapshot of your account 365/24/7 through our control panel. Snapshots stored in such a fashion can also be restored through the control panel too.
  • Snapshots are stored on the website's hosting server as standard but can also be downloaded in gzip archive format. Offline copies can be stored for safe keeping or used if migrating to another provider.
  • Snapshots include all files in /var/www/vhosts/DOMAIN and all databases associated with account.

Want to know more?

Frequently asked questions

We can't underscore the importance of having reliable backups. In a perfect world no hardware ever breaks, no software has vulnerability and no hackers want to break into your site and send spam email. Sadly, we don't live in that world, and things can and do ho wrong.

Backups too can go wrong. Given the size, scale and frequency of the data we have to backup (running into terabytes) for our clients, the process is automated. It's also impossible for us to manually review each and every backup for integrity.

With this in mind, you should always test your backups, and if possible keep your own offline backups. And test those too. When it comes to backing up your critical data, trust nothing and no one. Ensuring you have reliable backups that you can fall back to ultimately rests on your shoulders.

This depends on your hosting. If you use our WordPress hosting plan for example, we offer a free staging area. You can restore your backups to your staging area without impacting your live site. You can then compare the two and see how your backups would look and function if an emergency called for them.

Snapshot is our special backup tool that comes as standard on professional, Universal and WordPress hosting. This is offered in addition to our automated backups. Snapshot lets you take control of your website backup process through our control panel.

At any time, you can simply click a button and the snapshot system will take a copy of all your site data, there and then. You can choose to leave that on your hosting server (and restore the snapshot any time you like) or download it offline for safe keeping.

We recommend you take regular offline snapshots at intervals that make sense for the type of data your site generates. We will always take automated backups as detailed above for you, but if anything does go wrong, you can still sleep soundly knowing you have offline data copies too.