The hard work which goes in building and maintaining an e-commerce website for your business cannot be undermined. It is a valuable asset for your business which can make or break any business. But disaster can strike anytime. Even a small bug can break your website and cause a heavy amount of loss. One way to prepare yourself for such unforeseen circumstances is to make a complete backup for your website so that the data can be restored in the least possible time. 

Importance of data backup for an e-commerce website

1. Hard work going in the drain
   Building an e-commerce website requires a lot of investment and hard work. If data loss happens, all the hard work may go into the drain. It is essential to create frequent backups to restore your website.
2. Downtime is a disease
   Downtime not only disables your website from interacting with potential customers but also creates distrust among users from accessing your website in the future. A smooth recovery process with the help of backups can avert such fears among customers.
3. Reputation damage
   If your website is down due to a security breach, then it doesn’t help your reputation in the market. People find it difficult trusting a system which has already been breached.
4. Employee theft
   Surveys suggest that 85% of the employees have leaked vital information of some type. This mostly happens in anger and long-term discontent among employees. A proper backup and disaster recovery plan can protect against such acts of your employees. 
5. Keeping pace with the advancement
   Cloud-based technologies, like Cloud storage and Cloud Hosting services, are the future. It is important to keep pace with technological advancement, so your business stays relevant. 

Best practices for a backing up your website

1. Hosting policy
   Many hosting providers take the backup responsibility on themselves and store them on redundant arrays of independent disks (RAIDs). So, if your hosting provider offers such a package, it is wiser to take them. Ecommerce websites prefer Cloud Hosting services for the advanced data storage, backup and restore features.
2. Backup your data on the cloud
   Many external applications like CodeGuard creates automatic backups of your website on the cloud. This stores the data on offsite location, which can protect it from any disaster at the data centre. 

Frequency of baking up data of an e-commerce website

There is no fixed time period to decide the frequency of creating backups. It all depends on the type and contents of your website.  If your e-commerce website is very dynamic and the contents and products are added frequently, then it is in your best interest to create automatic backups for your website daily or weekly. On the other hand, if the contents of your website remain more or less static, then the frequency can also vary accordingly.

Conclusion

Cloud Hosting is favoured for creating backups and disaster recovery solution for their reliability. In Cloud Hosting, the data is stored in a cloud on multiple servers; thus, its more reliable over traditional hosting. Storing data offsite on the cloud rather than on a physical data centre helps alleviate much of the fear surrounding data recovery.