Turn WordPress Into a Powerful Business Tool
In terms of backups and disaster recovery, this is probably the best plugin I’ve used, not only for regular backups, scheduled offsite backups, but also site transfers and migrations.
I install it on every client website without exception.
It also comes with a malware checking facility.
It’s one of those plugins that just gets installed, no questions. It’s also one of those plugins, which once in a rare moment, you are soooo glad you installed!
Video and article coming soon!
For many years, I used GoDaddy. I’d also tried many others, but kept coming back to GoDaddy.
However – recently I’m finding that NameCheap are my preferred choice. Partly because they’re great on domain pricing, and they have a very smooth purchase process. But mainly, because they offer privacy protection (which they call WhoisGuard) and SSL at unbeatable prices.
Domain privacy (WhoisGuard) means that your contact information used when you register the domain isn’t made public – because those pesky spam robots harvest those public email addresses and send you rubbish, as well as sell the email addresses to spam lists..
And SSL is becoming more important these days, if you want any form of security for sensitive information – and of course, it’s critical for any payment information.
NameCheap also do hosting of course, but I still recommend SiteGround for that.
More details coming soon, on what domain names to choose when thinking of marketing and seo.
My preferred host is SiteGround. For a number of good reasons. I’ve explained it more in another post, but one of the lesser known features of SiteGround hosting is the ‘staging’ system they provide.
This basically lets you make a copy of your website – and work on it separately from your live site, by clicking a button!
Once you’ve created the staging copy, you’ve basically got a full copy/backup to play around with.
This is very useful and can be used in two ways:
Of course – looking at those two options – you can see why ‘staging’ is a great idea. You can work on a copy to make sure it’s ok, before it affects your live site.
This is just a post about using staging as a way of backing up and restoring – there’s another SiteGround post about actual hosting, and why I recommend them most.