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:
- Make a copy of your live site – then make the changes on the copy. If it goes wrong, it’s ok because it’s the test site. Once it works well, ‘push’ the copy up to the live site.
- Make a copy of your live site – then make the changes on your live site. If it works ok, fine. If it breaks, then use the copy to overwrite the live site and put it back into a working state.
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.