How your backups work

Every site is backed up automatically from the night it is created. You do not turn this on and there is no plugin to install.

What is in one

Files and database together, as one restorable point in time. A backup of only the database is not a backup of a site — restoring it against newer files gives you a broken site — so we never take them separately.

How often, and how long they are kept

Nightly, with the retention shown on your plan. Sites → your site → Backups lists every point available with its date and size.

Taking one yourself

Before a risky change, press Back up now on the same screen. It runs in a couple of minutes and does not interrupt the site.

Where they are stored

Off the machine the site runs on, in a different location, encrypted. A server failing does not take its backups with it — which is the entire reason for the separation.

What a backup does not protect you against

A problem you do not notice for longer than your retention window. A defacement found six weeks later, on a plan retaining fourteen days, has no clean point to go back to. This is why the malware scan and the uptime checks matter as much as the backups do.

Your own deletions of the whole site, past the recycle-bin window — the backups are destroyed with the site.

Sites you host somewhere else

The paragraph above is about sites on our hosting. A site on anybody else's hosting can be backed up here too, and that one you do turn on — we have no access to a server we do not run until you give us a way in.

Backups in the menu lists every outside site you have connected, whether we are backing it up, and whether we could also put it back. There are two ways in, and the difference matters before you choose rather than during an emergency:

Our WordPress plugin. Install it, pair it, done — we never hold a password to your server. It can take backups. It cannot restore one automatically, because a plugin runs inside WordPress, and a WordPress too broken to load is exactly the site you are trying to restore.

SSH or SFTP. You give us a host, a username, the site's folder and a key. This one can push a site back, including when the site itself will not load. If one-click restores are why you are here, this is the connection to make.

Connecting an outside site happens under Content → External sites; after that its Backups tab is where you choose the channel. The space you need is the add-on you buy — 1 GB, 10 GB or 50 GB per site, each keeping 30 days.

⭐ A backup you have never restored is a hypothesis. Restore one to staging occasionally. It takes minutes and it is the only way to know.