Bluehost Backup...

[Chassey Group]

Hi! We are setting up a new site & forum in the next few weeks. We have Bluehost & are currently using the Site Backup & Restore option they offer for $19.99 a year. Is this enough to be safe? Does anyone have experience with using this service? Also, open to other suggestions that might be better.

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[Gene Steinberg]

The best Bluehost backup is a new host. The company was once good, before being purchased by Endurance International, a large corporation that owns dozens of hosting names, and moves everyone into a low-end datacenter. Don't take my word for it. Do an online search and you'll see what I mean. I had a dedicated server there for a brief period of two and experienced two major outages.

Here's the background:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Group

My suggestion is that you leave Bluehost and consider other options. If they are still using cPanel, you should be able to backup your site and the databases rarely easily and import them on your new host.

Recommendations? For simple shared, I have had good experiences with Namecheap. We have a dedicated server over there, and they also handle 40 of my domains. One of my clients has a higher-end shared package. (Disclaimer: They advertise on my radio shows, but I am happy to recommend them regardless.)

Yes, there are other good hosts that offer inexpensive shared plans. But I want to talk only about companies I know about.

 

[WSWD]

Hi! We are setting up a new site & forum in the next few weeks. We have Bluehost & are currently using the Site Backup & Restore option they offer for $19.99 a year. Is this enough to be safe? Does anyone have experience with using this service? Also, open to other suggestions that might be better.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Personally, no, I don't think it's good enough. You should never have your only backup on the same network/same datacenter as your hosting account. What happens if the entire datacenter goes down and you need to restore your site elsewhere? Of course if it's just a small cPanel account, back it up to your home computer.