Website backups and recovery points
A backup is only worth what a restore proves. This is how website backups work in UHost: what a recovery point contains, how often they are taken, how many are kept, and how to keep a copy somewhere that is not the server you are backing up.
What gets taken
Recovery points and file snapshots.
A recovery point is the whole website at a moment: its databases and then its files, in that order, so the database is never newer than the files that expect it. A file snapshot is the files alone, which is the quicker thing to take before you change something and the quicker thing to put back when a deployment goes wrong.
Databases are also backed up on their own, and UHost keeps up to ten of those per database, which is what you want when the mistake was a bad query rather than a bad release.
How often
A schedule beats remembering.
Under Automatic backups, a website is set to daily or weekly and UHost keeps up to seven, replacing the oldest as it goes. Daily with seven kept means a week of history; weekly with seven means roughly seven weeks of it. Choose by how much work you would be willing to redo, not by how much disk you have.
- Daily for anything with customers, orders or comments in it
- Weekly for a site that only changes when you change it
- A manual one before any upgrade, whatever the schedule is
Where they are kept
A backup on the same server is half a backup.
Website backups kept on the machine are there for the ordinary case: a bad deployment, a wrong delete, a broken plugin. They do not survive the server itself being lost, which is the case people actually fear.
Off-site backups send copies to S3-compatible storage or to another server over SFTP. Set that up once and the same schedule that fills Local website backups fills the off-site copies too.
The panel's own configuration is backed up and restored separately from the command line, so rebuilding a server does not mean rebuilding every website by hand.
The part people skip
Restore one before you need to.
An untested backup is a belief, not a plan. The cheapest way to find out whether your website backups work is to take a copy of a site — a copy gets its own database, so it is a real staging site rather than a second name for the live one — and restore a recovery point onto that instead of onto anything that matters.
Do it once, while nothing is wrong. The thing you learn is usually not whether the backup exists, but how long the restore takes, and that is the number you will want on the day.
Set the schedule when you create the site, not later. Hosting your first website covers the rest of the setup.
Your servers, without the per-account bill.
UHost launches 13 October 2026: the whole panel free for up to three websites, and Pro for unlimited websites on a server.