You know that depending on your webhost you might not be able to actually backup your site. It’s true. Many webhosts are simply not powerful enough to allow WordPress to back itself up because this involves backing up all the files, dumping the whole database and putting it all into one giant zip file. But luckily there are a few things to check about your webhost and you know in the next few minutes whether or not you are able to backup your site. If you aren’t I would highly recommend you move to a powerful webhost such as HostGator or Blue Host so you can now backup your site and not have to worry about it.

Make sure that your webhost charges you a monthly fee, that they use cPanel and that you are not using a reseller account which means that someone else has resold part of their space to you. Avoid free webhosts at all costs. I know it’s tempting to save those few dollars per month in order to be host for free on a site like Google Pages, Blogger.com, WordPress.com or some other free webhost. But these hosts simply are not paying the money they should to give you decent space, decent memory and decent bandwidth. Pay for a real webhost and you’ll be glad that you did. That means that the site will stay up longer, even more reliable, faster and that backups will actually run.

The next thing I would recommend you to do is to make sure that your webhost runs cPanel. It’s very easy to find out if it does. Go to whatever your site is called /cPanel and if there’s a way to log in to your website / c p a n e l. Then this means that its using the most common website back end software and that anything you run, especially if you run a backup, probably will function without any issues.

Finally be sure that your webhost is not someone else reselling their space to you. You don’t necessarily have to have a dedicated server or a vps, virtual private server, and you don’t even have to have a reseller account of your own. But if someone is reselling, for example space on HostGator it will probably be in your best interest to be simply hosted with HostGator itself so that your memory and space are not split up.

When someone hosts you on their webhost they usually make sure to give you adequate storage and memory so that your site can hold everything and runs very quickly. With a reseller account they don’t check for those things which means that one person might have enough room and space for one person. But then they will resell parts of that space to 20, 50, even 100 people and now your website runs at a slow pace and won’t actually backup or restore.

Those are some very simply checks, make sure that your webhost charges a monthly fee, runs cPanel and is not a reseller of someone else’s services.

Now that you know you can run a WordPress backup do it right now before you lose anything else. Go to www.backupcreator.com right now.

Backup, Clone & Protect Your WordPress Sites
Using Backup Creator

Have you ever heard of these services called Amazon S3 and Dropbox? They are file storage services that are much more reliable than your computer’s local hard drive. When you make a backup of your site you don’t ever want to lose that backup. The real question is if your computer’s hard drive crashes tomorrow will you lose anything? Will you lose months or years of old websites backups. The question should hopefully be no because hard drives crash, websites get bigger and you can easily restore from anywhere as long as you make sure to backup using one of these services.

Hard drives crash and if you are using an external hard drive you still aren’t safe. Your hard drive will probably crash at some point. If not in a year from now, ten or twenty years from now. What you should do is when you have a backup of your site, get an account at Dropbox.com or at AWS.amazon.com. These are both great file storage services that are very cheap to put files on. All you have to do is just get an account, browse to it and then upload your file and wait for it to finish. Once the file is done now a permanent copy is stored online that will probably never go anywhere. Just on the fact that your hard drive might crash is an excellent reason for you to put another copy of your backup up in S3 or in Dropbox.

The other problem is that your websites get bigger and bigger over time as you add more content. If you have, let’s say, a 1 gigabyte website the size of your backup is going to be 1 gigabyte. If you backup every week your site will grow to 1 gigabyte, 2 gigabytes, 3 gigabytes, 4 gigabytes and so on every single week. It’s important for you that once you backup your site to take that backup off your site so it’s not wasting space. Instead put it on one of these file storage sites that are meant to hold lots of files, that are meant to hold large files. That way you are moving it away from your website and your website can hold the actual content, not all of your backups.

Finally, when you put your backups in Dropbox or in S3 you can now restore them from anywhere. This means that if you lose your computer, if your computer is stolen, your computer crashes or you simply are not at your computer, you can still restore that backup from anywhere. Download it from Amazon S3, put it on your website, click the button and now your backup has been restored. Store your backups in S3 or in Dropbox because hard drives tend to crash, websites do get bigger over time and now you can restore your information from anywhere.

Claim your WordPress backup plugin right now at www.backupcreator.com.

Backup, Clone & Protect Your WordPress Sites
Using Backup Creator

You’ve finally decided that it’s a good idea, in fact a great idea, to backup that WordPress blog. Now if anything goes wrong you have a copy somewhere at least you can put somewhere else. What features should you look for in a WordPress backup plugin? I’ve seen many plugins that overload you with features. Tell you it’ll backup to S3, that it will backup to Rackspace, they add all kinds of fancy features. At the end of the day do you need all that fanciness or do you just need a backup plugin that simply works?

That’s why I’m going to tell you, if you are looking for a backup plugin, find one that is easy to use, that can actually restore and it can also clone your site somewhere else. What’s the point in having the best backup plugin in the world if you can’t use it, if you don’t know what to do? That’s why if you can’t find a backup plugin where you can just click on one button then it’s useless to you. Find one and when you’re looking for backup plugins look for those that show screen shots or videos of the plugin in action. Look at do you have to go through a ten step process, do you have to confirm every step of the way, or can you click on one button and now your WordPress blog is safely backed up.

The reason I say this is because you’re not going to just make one backup of your site. You should ideally make a backup of your site at least once a month, if not several times a month, and it shouldn’t be a chore. It should be something where you go in, you click a button and now you have a copy. Make sure your backup plugin is easy to use.

Next, make sure that your backup can actually restore. It sounds silly for me to say that your backup plugin should also restore. But you’d be surprised at how many WordPress plugins simply don’t work or are out of date. What you should do is install a backup plugin and immediately take a backup. Then go and install a new blog and see if you can restore that same blog somewhere else. You’d be surprised at how many backup plugins won’t restore. You might be diligently and obediently backing up your site over and over and over every month but if something goes wrong you’re in the same situation as if you had not made a backup. The backup did not complete successfully.

This brings me to my final point that your backup plugin should also have the ability to clone your site somewhere else. What’s the difference between restoring and cloning? Cloning means that you can backup your site on one location and go to a different website or a different folder and put your site in that new place. All the links, all the information, everything will work just fine. Why is cloning so important? Because if you want to restore a site you might want to restore it in a different location first just to make sure you don’t destroy your original backup, your original site. Once you can clone sites it means that if you have your site set up exactly the way you want it you can customize your theme, plugins, settings, memberships, all that stuff. Back it up and restore it or cone it in a new location and now you have saved tons of time for yourself.

When you’re looking for a WordPress backup plugin make sure it’s one that’s easy to use which means clicking one button, that the backups can successfully restore and that you’ve cloned these sites onto other locations. Claim the best WordPress backup plugin on the market that’s easy to use, that can restore and in fact clone your site somewhere else at www.backupcreator.com.

Backup, Clone & Protect Your WordPress Sites
Using Backup Creator

For a lot of people backing something up is a tedious job, even if it only involves clicking one button. But I guess you have to remember to log into your site, backup the entire site and download the file so really how often do you need to be backing up your site? The easy answer to that is that you should be backing up your site as often as you update it. How often do you update it? That is how often you should backup.

If you update daily, backup daily. If you update monthly, backup monthly. If you’re not sure, if it’s somewhere in the middle then decide if you’re going to backup either weekly or monthly and make sure that you always backup before and after an upgrade to your WordPress software or before making a major change to your website.

Go back and look at your blog posts and find out how often you update your site. I know a common thing that happens is that people will start updating their WordPress blog on a daily, or even more frequently than daily, basis at first. Then they’ll run out of ideas or they’ll run out of content and then die down to perhaps once per month of updating. I know that’s what my blog is, with my blog I update about once per month. Just make it part of your routine and maybe even after making any posts, click the button and backup your blog. That way if the worst happens you at least have everything up until you’re more recent blog post.

Some of you might have a multi author site or might update on an irregular basis and if that is your situation I would highly recommend that you add a recurring reminder to your calendar. Either on every Monday morning or the first of every month put an exact time where you’re supposed to log into your blog, click the backup and save it somewhere safe. Trust me, you’ll thank me if anything goes wrong with your WordPress blog at some point.

In addition to these weekly or monthly backups you’re making to your blog, be sure to back up your site both before and after an upgrade to WordPress itself. It doesn’t happen often but every now and then, when you upgrade your WordPress software a few little things go wrong and if your blog is completely trashed at least you have that backup. Even if you’re not updating, if you’re about to make a major change to your blog. For example changing the theme, changing the navigation, changing the content around, it can’t hurt to make one simple backup before anything is touched. Because I’ve been in a situation where I’ve actually broken my WordPress blog. I’ve changed too many things and it’s now broken, and now I need to get back to that earlier stage. If not just to have a working website for people to view.

Before and after you upgrade and when you make a major change you backup that site. In addition make it part of your weekly or monthly routine and back up your blog more frequently if you update your blog more frequently. Click here now to claim your WordPress backup plugin at www.backupcreator.com.

Backup, Clone & Protect Your WordPress Sites
Using Backup Creator

I hope that you have heard of the concept of backing up your files, your website or even your WordPress blog. It’s something that everyone needs to do but so few people do it. You need to backup your WordPress site because it’s better safe than sorry, because you might get hacked and because you might need some kind of an old file or even to see how your WordPress site used to look.

You might have heard that saying, you’re better safe than sorry. That means that it might not be fun to brush your teeth, but when you get cavities don’t you wish you’d brushed your teeth more? It might not be fun to put on a seatbelt when you drive, but if ever get in a car wreck aren’t you glad you wore that seatbelt? Well the same logic applies to backing up your WordPress blog. It might seem tedious to backup a site and to spend those few minutes clicking a button for something that you might never use in the future. But even if you’re backing up a site every single week and you never need to use that backup. It’s a good thing to know that if you had to use it, if the worst happened, you could always get it back.

Even thought it might seem like a waste of time right now it’s only a waste of time if nothing goes wrong. If you lost the last several years of your WordPress blog you would have wished you spent those couple of minutes clicking the button and generating a WordPress website backup.

The next thing that might happen is that you might get hacked and if you’ve ever had spyware or a virus on your computer, you might know that it’s a pain in the butt to try to clear that off. To try to scan and remove anything that’s on there. But a way easier thing to do, if you ever get spy ware or a virus or a hacker on your WordPress blog is to just delete everything and start over. Now if you had a backup you could just blow away the whole account, put it up somewhere else and restore your old WordPress Website.

Even if you knew how that person got in it, well then you can restore your website and fill the hole, but now you don’t have to spend days or weeks trying to fix something that’s broken. Just delete it and put up the fresh, pristine copy of WordPress that was already there.

Don’t you ever wish you had the very first website you ever created? Don’t you wish you had the very first video, the first article you ever made? Most people don’t have them, most people at some point have let that website, or those articles, go. Now maybe at some point you accidentally deleted an article, deleted a video, deleted a graphic and you wanted to get back at it. We’ve all been there, we’ve all lost files. If you keep a weekly backup your chances of losing files are very, very low because you don’t have to worry about where things are stored or organized. Just go back to when you remember you had that file, restore the backup somewhere, even on a test site and grab the file that you need.

That’s why it’s so important to backup your WordPress database and files because you’re better safe than sorry, you might get hacked and it’s important to have that old file for historical purposes. Use this plugin right now and backup your WordPress site before it’s too late at www.backupcreator.com.

Backup, Clone & Protect Your WordPress Sites
Using Backup Creator

It doesn’t make sense to backup your WordPress blog only to store that backup file on the same website. Because if you lose that website you’re also going to lose that backup file. When it comes to backups it does pay to be paranoid, it does pay to assume that anything that can go wrong will. That way if everything does go wrong you can still get your website back. This is why as soon as you make a backup you should save it to your hard drive. But you should also save it to a remote location such as FTP, Dropbox or Amazon S3 and maybe even store it off to a DVD disc if the backup is small enough.

Just keeping your backup file on your website doesn’t make sense. As soon as you make a backup save it to your local hard drive immediately. Just in case the file gets deleted or you lose your entire website, you at least have this backup in two locations. What I do is I have a folder just for website backups and as soon as the file has been downloaded to my hard drive I name that backup file the current date and time. That way when I look at that I can see which backups I have and when the last backup was made. If I need to delete older backups to save space I’m not deleting too little or too much.

On your hard drive create a backup folder and name your backup files the current date. If you happen to have an external hard drive, even better. That way you can use this on multiple computers. But hard drives tend to fail and that’s why if you have some other place you can store that backup file offsite, that’s even better. What I’m talking about is some kind of a remote FTP service or other website. What’s even easier is if you have a Dropbox account you can simply drag your folder or your file into a certain folder and it will automatically be placed up in a site called Dropbox, where you can access it from anywhere.

If you don’t have a Dropbox account you can still use Amazon S3 which is the same idea. They store your file somewhere else where you don’t have to worry about it ever getting lost. Something I do every now and then is I will burn or write my backup files to a DVD disc. Everyone seems to have a DVD writer these days and all you have to do is pop in a disc, drag the file into that CD icon and it will burn a copy of your backup file onto that disc. If you want to label it, put it in a binder, whatever, but now you can easily access your backup files and they are permanently stored and nothing can happen. That’s the only problem with having your file somewhere on a hard drive somewhere is that it might be edited. Now that it’s stored on a disc nothing can happen to it.

As soon as you take a backup of your site make sure to at least put another copy of that backup somewhere other than your website. Either on your local hard drive, remote FTP, Dropbox, S3 or DVD disc.

Use this WordPress backup plugin to keep your WordPress blog in a safe place: www.backupcreator.com.

Backup, Clone & Protect Your WordPress Sites
Using Backup Creator

You should have heard that it’s a very good idea to keep a backup of your website in case something goes wrong with it, it’s worth it to make it part of your weekly routine. To spend a few seconds clicking that backup button instead of a few years trying to get back to where you were. But you might be confused about should you run a cPanel backup of your entire website or a WordPress backup just of your single blog.

The difference is that with a cPanel backup you’re backing up the whole account. With WordPress you’re backing up just a blog and you should backup your cPanel on a monthly basis and WordPress on a weekly basis. Your cPanel webhost has the ability to backup your entire site in one click. This includes all of your email accounts, databases, files, blogs, forums, everything on your site can be backed up with one click. But what’s the problem with this?

The problem is that if you have a large website this can take up a lot of time and a lot of space. If you have a 20 gigabyte website making this backup will cost you 20 gigabyte every time you do it. If you backed up your entire 20 gigabyte website every single week then after 5 weeks you need a terabyte. After 10 weeks you need 2 terabytes and so on. It would take up tons of space. It doesn’t make sense to backup those same video files over and over and over again if those aren’t changing. You should only be backing up the stuff that’s really changing, the most recent information. That’s why a cPanel backup is good to take some times but you should really take a WordPress backup more frequently.

What does a WordPress backup do? It stores your WordPress database which includes your settings and your content. As well as your files which include WordPress itself and any images or audios, or videos that happen to be within your WordPress folder. You should back up this WordPress site on a more frequent basis than your entire cPanel account because it’s faster and it’s smaller. You can use a WordPress backup plugin to do this and all you have to do it install the plugin, click the backup button and now you have a file that you can save immediately to your hard drive. Now you can use that anywhere you want.

Basically if you’re concerned or worried about should you use a cPanel backup or a WordPress backup. Backup up your entire cPanel account on a monthly basis and your WordPress account on a weekly basis. That way you have the best of both worlds, you have everything stored somewhere but your most recent, your most frequently changing stuff is easier to find.

Go ahead and use this WordPress backup plugin right now at www.backupcreator.com.

Backup, Clone & Protect Your WordPress Sites
Using Backup Creator

There are many reasons to backup your WordPress blog and make sure you always have a copy of it in case something goes wrong. Your database might crash, you might accidentally delete some of your posts or files, and you might even need to roll back to an earlier version of your WordPress blog. It’s a simple fact that computers fail all the time. A hard drive might crash out and many people don’t realize that your website is simply sitting on a computer somewhere that has all the same problems as your computer. That computer might blue screen, it might not turn on one day, the hard drive might stop. But either way something might go wrong and databases crash all the time. If the database crashes it might lose the entire thing. It might lose your several last year’s worth of WordPress posts, comments, users, everything might be gone in a single second.

But if you’ve backed up your WordPress site you can restore it later on and get access to it any time you want. Even if everything goes wrong, set it up again exactly the way it was. And even ignoring database crashes you might accidentally delete something. I know I do that all the time. You might delete the wrong comment, the wrong blog post and even empty the trash and never have a way to get that back. I know that sometimes even my webhost is fixing a database issue and they will delete something without me having to do anything. So even if you think you’re perfect and you never make a mistake you might delete something and it’s better safe than sorry. It’s worth taking those few seconds to backup your WordPress blog so that you can get it back whenever you need to.

Speaking of getting stuff back whenever you need to, would you write a 50 page term paper in Microsoft Word and never save it along the way? Of course not. You might type one page and save it, another page and save it. Why not treat your WordPress blog like a Word document? Which means you might set up the WordPress theme, now you want to take a backup right at that point. Then add in some extra posts, take a backup right there. Every week take a backup so if you ever need to get back to an earlier part, maybe you made one change to your theme and you liked it, but then changed a graphic and you didn’t like it. You want to get back to that earlier change that you backed up your site at every point along the way, you can get back anything you ever need.

That’s why you should backup your WordPress blog, in case your database crashes, you accidentally delete some stuff, you need to go back to an earlier version.

Either way you should backup your WordPress blog right away, right now. Use this backup plugin to safely keep copies of your WordPress blog at www.backupcreator.com.

Backup, Clone & Protect Your WordPress Sites
Using Backup Creator

I know that I heard about backups and backup plugins for many years before actually using them and I regretted waiting as long as I did, because in the meantime I lost websites and I lost files. If I had simply run a backup every week I would not have had to worry about lost information. I wouldn’t have to worry about getting hacked, clicking a button, deleting files, deleting websites, deleting content. It all would have been safely stored in a backup somewhere.

If you are hesitating about using a WordPress backup plugin, or even hesitating about buying a WordPress backup plug in, consider the time wasted. Consider the payments coming in everyday to your business and consider the hard earned content that you spent a lot of time creating such as video. First of all, if you spent two minutes a week backing up your WordPress site then that’s time well spent, because you’re safeguarding against anything that might have gone wrong.

On the other hand, if you don’t backup and you have a website online for three years. For three years the site for some reason goes down and you don’t have that site. Now you’ve lost three years of your life. Is it worth it to put in two minutes a week to save three years of your life? I think it is and if you have that attitude then you really won’t mind getting a backup plugin, using a backup plug in and creating backups on a regular basis.

The next thing to know, this concerns me, is if I’m selling information or I’m using WordPress as a shopping cart or as a membership site. I need to make sure that people who have paid for things still get access. If someone is paying me on a recurring monthly basis and the site goes away, not only have I lost my site, I’ve lost my monthly recurring income. In many cases there’s no way to get it back. If someone is paying you on a recurring basis and there is a certain transaction ID and a certain number associated with that person paying you month after month. It’s very difficult to set up the site exactly the way it was and associate that person paying monthly to that user account they had on your WordPress site.

On the other hand, if you had made a WordPress backup after that person starting paying you monthly then you can restore that backup. Now when they’re paying you monthly they still get credit for those payments they are making for you.

Have you ever recorded a one hour or two hour, or a three hour video only to accidently delete it or find out it wasn’t recording properly? I have and it’s even worse to have the best video you’ve ever made. To have it come out perfectly and be online, and everyone loves it but then you accidently delete it or something happens to it. This way, now that you’ve backed up that video and restored it later, you can get it back and it’ll never go away. You’ll never lose it no matter what from this point in time forward.

Go ahead right now and get a backup plug because you know you need it. You know that otherwise you’re going to waste time, you’re going to lose money and you’re going to lose your best content. Grab the Backup Creator plugin for WordPress right away at www.backupcreator.com.

Backup, Clone & Protect Your WordPress Sites
Using Backup Creator

If you’re worried about people getting into your WordPress blog, I want to let you know the ways they normally do it so you can easily safeguard against these attacks. Fortunately computer hacking is nothing like you see in the movies. They don’t plug in a fancy computer and run a bunch of numbers, usually the way people get into your website, into your WordPress blog is through some pretty simple and common means, such as an out-dated version of WordPress, out-dated plugins with vulnerabilities, and simple easy to guess usernames and passwords.

Did you know that Al Gore’s blog has been hacked, CNN blogs have been hacked, and these all happened because they used older versions of WordPress. But as soon as these high profile blogs were hacked, the creators of WordPress released a newer version that prevented these kinds of attacks.

That’s why it’s a very good idea just to keep your WordPress version up to date.

Usually when they fix a problem, it’s a very-very small and obscure bug and you can upgrade the latest version in just one click. In your WordPress dashboard, go to the updates area and they will tell you either that WordPress is up to date, or that it needs an upgrade. Click that button and you are good to go.

Now what good is having up to date WordPress version if some of your plugins still contain those security holes? If you are really worried about it then do a few Google searches for the plugins you’re using on your site and see if anyone has reported security holes or flaws with these plugins or themes. A very famous security hole in the past was called Tim-some, which was a way to resize images in a theme so you could have WordPress theme and upload a picture or a logo to that theme, and for some reason the way that it processed that, the way that it resized that image allowed someone to gain access to that WordPress blog.

If you happen to have one of those plugins or themes, all you had to do was do a quick search and update the latest version of that plugin or theme, that fixed the issue. Now on a very-very rare basis, some plugins are simply no longer updated, but if they aren’t a Google search will tell you this, that you are using an insecure plugin that has no updates, and in that case it’s a good idea to stop using it and find an alternative.

And finally, even with the most up to date WordPress and most up to date plugins, most people gain access to your WordPress by simply guessing. By simply trying to login using the username Admin and password Admin, or username Admin and password Test. So what you should do is delete that Admin user and set up a user account using your first and last name, and a password containing letters and numbers that no one will ever guess.

Those are some very easy ways that hackers get into WordPress that you can protect yourself against. Keep WordPress up to date, keep plugins up to date, and in fact, Google the names of those plugins to make sure that there are no vulnerabilities and use hard to guess usernames and passwords in WordPress.

Don’t wait until it’s too late, backup WordPress right now using the plugin at www.backupcreator.com.

Backup, Clone & Protect Your WordPress Sites
Using Backup Creator