Hi all, Im using a web hosting service that I got off from ebay for cheap.. They said its a 4yr package and one time fee only. Been with them for half a year now, and currently no problems. I don't want to switch hosting company, because most of them are expensive and pay monthly.. I own a vbulletin forum, and im hosting it with them. The concerns I have now is, what if the hosting company scams me. Will I lose all the forum posts and members? I heard someone say that I would need to backup regularly to prevent this happening, is this true? Can someone guide me on what do I need to backup? Please help thanks!
Yes domain is right. Just use phpmyadmin and export the database. It's good to do this with any host, even one you pay for monthly as you never know when they will have a server malfunction or something of such.
It's good to back your forums up regularly. I have written a tutorial on how to back up a specific forum (just the files and the database, so you don't need a clunky cPanel backup) here. http://www.forumsrule.com/showthread.php?tid=913 And to restore a backup. http://www.forumsrule.com/showthread.php?tid=905 I usually will make a daily database backup and a file backup every time I know I made major changes. This tutorial works for any forum software (or any PHP/MySQL software) because it uses cPanel and does not use the forum software itself.
No matter who your host is you should keep regular local (home computer) backups. Even go so far as to take your files and put them on CD/DVD or thumbdrive. It's a poor webmaster that loses his website to hackers or blames the host. It's your website. Back it up.
The plan sounds more as of a sharedhosting plan, so u will not get ssh control. Anyways, you must be making a regular backup of forum, at least once a month. Try to keep attachments folder outside the forum dir if you have a forum for say an link like: mysite.com/forum, then you must have attachments under mysite.com/attach. What this does is it saves u lots of time in compressing and backing up. You can also back on ur files and db which are main for ur forum, even if u lose attachments by mistake you will not be in a big loss. If your plan is ssh option open, then I would recommend u to take a look at vbulletin.com/docs/html for backing up and restoring information You must at least have 1 remote backup per month, ir-respective of the hosts.
I always say "you get what you pay for" But backing up your website and database is a MUST on a DAILY basis. If you ever get hacked or your HDD crashes and all your data is lost you will be glad to have the last backup being 10 hours old and not 2 month. Believe me or not, if you stick around long enough in the webmaster business this will happen to you sooner or later! I for example pay for a managed dedicated server and I pay about 50 USD extra for daily backups on a different server. And even though the company is doing backups I pay them for I do backups by myself as well. Better safe then sorry. StarBuG