An important aspect of self-hosting a WordPress website is ensuring a backup system is in place. Those of you working with Squarespace, Wix, or Weebly don’t need to worry about backups, because those platforms host the underlying CMS themselves.

When you self-host a WordPress install on a common web host, that service provides WordPress for you, and backups are a necessary safety measure to ensure you don’t lose your site or valuable content.

For many years, backups were a mystery. “Does my web host provide backups?” Maybe or maybe not. Your site was hacked or disrupted in some way, and you found out the hard way that cheap, shared hosting does not provide for backups. You lost everything and couldn’t get it back.

Recognizing the opportunity, a cottage industry of WordPress backup plugins popped up. While they solved a problem, the few that appeared had built in a default setting to back up your website to your own web server.

What? Backing up to your own server? In a folder created in your uploads directory on the server?. A server that can go down at any time?

Yes, that’s what I said. Makes no sense.

At the very least, it provided a backup system, but besides the server corrupting or getting hacked, all those backups ate up your allotted storage. You could set it to take a backup nightly and remove the prior version. However, if you wanted to set it to 30 days of backups, all of a sudden, you were out of storage space.

Your web host notified you of this, but you had absolutely no idea this was going on in the background. Storage is not unlimited, and backups can eat up all your storage allotment. When you reached your max storage capacity, your web host froze your site until you removed all of the backups to get back under the storage limit, which was only 50GB. You probably had to hire someone to log in to your server via FTP and investigate, which you could have done yourself if only you knew how!

While these plugins had options to back up to Amazon Cloud or Google Drive, you’re not a developer and weren’t sure how to set that up, so you left it to its own devices.

Some time went by, and there was a realization that backing up to your own server is a huge problem, so Automattic (the PRO services arm of WordPress) launched VaultPress, which synced your backup offsite onto their servers and provided one-click restore features.

Not to be outdone by Automattic or the backup plugins, website hosting companies like WP Engine, Flywheel, Kinsta, and Siteground began offering 30 days of site backups with a one-click restore function as a feature of your paid “managed hosting: plan. These plans are more expensive because they offer developer-centric features and access that the cheaper shared hosting does not.

The truth is, even if you have a “managed hosting” plan at one of the aforementioned hosting companies, you probably have no idea how backups work.

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