SNM068: Backup Your Blog Before These FIVE Disasters Strike

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five reasons why you absolutely, positively must back up your website on today's episode. Today's episode Brought to you by Convert Kit To find out how Conferred Kid can help you grow your business, save money and increase your relationship with your email list. Head over to serve no master dot com Backslash Convert kit Right now, Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. There are so many commercials about backing up your website software programs for back. You have different pieces of technology from your computer. It can be overwhelming and the cost can be very prohibitive. I know that when I look at different solutions providing security for my website of for different parts of my business, I often have to balance the cost of that solution versus the cost of losing that website of the cost of damage. That website, Some of the current website software and security solutions are very, very expensive. They're so expensive that I can't really afford to apply them to every part of my business. Certain security solutions air $300 per website. If you have 45 websites, you're not time with thousands of dollars and just becomes so expensive and so prohibitive that you can't afford the top of the line solutions. And you really need to be in a position where you make the right choice. And as much as having great security is a really good decision. If that great security fails, you lose the website. And even if your security everything goes fine, any other type of glitch your website can still be damaged without it being a security breach. For this reason, when you're making the choice to start your business, it's very important to start with backing up your website. Now. When you first put your website, you say just about it's no big deal on my Web sites. Not big enough. It's not important enough. There aren't enough people who would wanna hack my website? No one's gonna want to hurt me. I'm too much of a small fish. A couple of years ago, about two years ago, this giant bought that were developed a universal hack for all websites built on the WordPress platform. So they were able to automatically just attack website after website after website to these series of brute force attacks. And we talk in several other episodes about how to protect yourself from exactly this type of attack. But every single website that had their logging on the same page and was using admit as a user name they got broken into It didn't matter if you were big fish or small fry. They were attacking every website where they found where press with a certain version. And if you didn't update your back end quickly enough, you became very vulnerable. And many, many people who thought they would never pick me got hit simply because every single website in the world using WordPress got targeted was very mass targeting. And there are a couple of other reasons besides hacked. Hacking is often the first big reason we say, but let's be honest, we never think we're gonna hack. It's too evil sounding. It's too dark. It's too specific. Why would someone choose toe hack me? I'm not a big fish. People usually wanna hack someone big, but not always someone who's actually suffered from having a hack. I was very lucky. That was on one of my less important websites. It wasn't one of my primary sites, but I did have a hack incident, happened to one of my Web sites, and they ended up putting hundreds of gigabytes of pornography using my I P address, and they burned my I P address. I couldn't send emails on that account and two different I p address I've used in the past. I've gotten burned that way. So I got hacked one to the other. I P address got damage to swell with another hosting company. It's a known could receive my e mails for a long time because a bunch of spam emails went out when they broke into my I P address. The first reason you need to back up your site is one we never think about, but it's hosting betrayal, this one I experience more often than anything else. I've actually been through hosting material through four times in my career. This is where your host does something to damage your website. And there was a wide spectrum of possibility here. At one end of the spectrum is when my website got hacked. They uploaded a bunch of photography. The owning owners of the hosting company blamed me and I said, Please stop the heck and they're like, It's your fault. You shouldn't know how to reverse Hack and two others technological things. You guys have a security team. I pay you guys money to protect me. And this is No, no, you don't pay enough money for us to protect you. You paid just enough money for us to blame you. And now the one in her sights got hacked. We're gonna take we access to all of your websites. Now, that's something very important to remember. When I got hacked, they cut off all my access. I couldn't even log in via FTP. I could log into the back end. I lost everything. I was able to convince them to give me backup access for about 24 hours and finally unlocked one thing for 20 barge and try and back your stuff up, but then you're that's it. And so I was able to in the small pair of time, trying to fight fighting, get backups. And it wasn't very successful because my whole server had been damaged. A lot of things were broken, a running slow. So even though they gave me, like this safe access, I couldn't really do backup stuff. And when you do a backup, a very common decision when you back up your website is to keep your backups on the same server. And you say to yourself, Well, my installations inside, where press but my backups in a separate folder. Most backup programs do this as the default, but it's like leaving the key to your house sitting in the front lock or under the front Matt. Everyone's going to find it. Once someone has broken into your site via WordPress, it's very easy for them to hack into your ftp folders a swell. So having your backup materials in the same place you have your main files, it's pointless. You might as well not back up, because the odds of you surviving most of these five different incidents are slim. You'll probably lose everything now hosting betrayals. Also, I always say by your domains from note named cheap and host somewhere else, whether it's a small orange with stumpy ex hosting, the two that I recommend, or whether it's somewhere else those air simply the two hosts that I have the best experience with. But even when you have a host with a good experience, sometimes things wear out at a certain point. When my website got too big for a small orange, the people who worked at the company, I sent it a question of tech support. They made it changed to one of my files and my website stopped working and they said, No, it's your fault And I said, Guys, that Stephanie your foot. I haven't logged in two days. I was. I was working Friday. It took two days off. Come back Sunday night. It's not working, and you guys did something over the weekend. I understand that part of my folks I kept speaking a different tech support guys. They kept making changes and stuff so it could happen. It's not always intentional, and when tech support doesn't know what they've done and they're not all talk to each other, right? Everything go bad now. The mistakes they made changes made were only affecting my big web site, which is way too big. So as long as you have a small, normal website, you're not doing really advanced tech changes. A smaller just still find. I still host with them. I still have multiple websites with them, but I know that at a certain point your website can grow too big. At that point, you got to go W pecs hosting anywhere else. It's simply going to be way too expensive or the product of the inferior. You don't want either of those experiences. Hosting betrayal is pretty common one of the risks when you have your website hosted and you purchased the domain name of the same places that when they freeze your account, they'll take everything. That's why you want your hosting and you're domain ownership separated that if you're hosting count gets attacked, you can switch and deploy to a new hosting account in a matter of seconds, using your backups so that when you switched another company and you don't lose anything, But if it's both of the same place, you might lose that website name forever, and I know people that's happened to that's happened to some friends of mine, and I'm talking about people who are running. Seven figure businesses have to fight for the website, have to goto lawsuits through a nightmare to try and get their own properties back. All because they made this one small, simple mistake. And I have friends who still ignore my advice and they say, No, it's so much more convenient the process of connecting your two websites and I have a block post. It walks you through. It is about 30 seconds to two minutes. I just said the block post one my coaching clients yesterday, and she did it in two minutes, and she's very much inexperienced with technological stuff so very advanced, complicated. It's not even someone who is very much a neo fight to the back end of websites. They will learn in two minutes, and this is all most important steps you can take to protect your business to future proof your business. Because if you leave your hosting and your domain ownership in the same place, sometimes you're back. That becomes irrelevant because you've lost control of your own website and they won't give it back. They lock you out of your account. This could happen if you get email hacked and they're sending spam emails to recount. This could happen if people send complaints about e mails or sending out when you send out spam emails from here Website. The hosting company supposed to shut it down? This is part of the eye can span requirements. This is a U. S. Law thing. They're supposed to freeze your account. They're supposed to stop you from sending out emails. Now let's say it's simple. Syrup websites attacked the hackers break and they start sending out spam e mails because they've broken into your account. And this is very, very, very common. I know people who do that for a living. Okay, I know people who use black hats stolen website eyepiece to send out spam emails and make a living. It's dark, but it's reality. So someone is there. They've broken in your website. They're sending out spam. Unless people start complaining, you're upset hosts shuts you down. You've now been hacked. You've been robbed. You been violated. And the people you thought were gonna protect you have turned against you to protect themselves. And you've lost your website forever. You can't save it. Emails that come in that cause the complaint weren't even about e mails you sent. It doesn't matter. This moves us really into Second is the back of your site, which is getting hacked. There are two types of hacks. There's the stealth pack where they want to sneak in and use your server for a nefarious purposes. Is part of a bott network to attack other servers to send emails or to send out, in my experience, hundreds of gigabytes supporting me. I didn't even understand that hack. I didn't understand what they were doing. I didn't understand the purpose of it or whatever, but they were just pumping huge quantities of porn in and out of the website. Those were the three experiences that I've had personally dealt with personally. Now, if you're lucky and they do a stealth hack and they're just using your website to send emails that your permission you won't lose, the main website well discovers you just have to close up the loophole or however they broke it. And your main files aren't destroyed. You're lucky it's crazy says You're lucky if they do with those hacks where they're simply stealing. Resource is far worse is a malicious hack, which is where they go in and erase all of your WordPress backup files. Image files. Everything as part of a joke is part of a prank or proof they can. Not only is this done by individuals, it's done by organizations that get together, and they have had competitions. Or they want to see how much fun they could have. Messing with people's hobbies and hurting people. They want to see if they can hurt as many people as they can. So sometimes they specifically target smaller or personal blog's simply to see if they can hurt regular people to make him feel bad. And also, there's a great deal of state sponsored happening of the exact same kind where they target competitors. If you blogged about democracy in certain countries, better believe they'll do everything they can to shut down your website. If you blogged about politics, there are a great many people that will actively work against you, especially if you're on the wrong side of the politics for that particular country. Even if you don't live there. They do have professional hackers. They're definitely military units for different militaries around the world that are all pure hackers, the only combat they go into a cyber combat. Maybe you'll never get targeted, and maybe you won't, but the risk is high. So when I look at the danger of something, there's two things to look at when you're factoring. How important is it to prepare for a certain type of situation? You look at the odds of it happening, and then the amount of devastation will cause. So if it's one in a 1,000,000 but it will completely end your business and hurt your family forever and cause your family to not be able to eat and lose your home. Yes, the risk is low, but the punishment and the result is so big we want to take action. And remember, hacking is just one of the reasons you want to back up your website. The third reason is bad employee. I hire workers to work on my Web site all the time. Now I hire them through third party Web sites ever really high. People wanna one, but sometimes I do. I always before hiring someone make offside backup that they can't get to, so that if they go in and destroy everything, if they're going to make a massive mistake on accident, if they go in and it turns out they lied on their resume, which I've dealt with, they don't know what they're doing and they make things worse and they don't fix it. I can't reverted because if you hire someone who doesn't know what they're doing, they go on and make a few changes. Whether it's an SDO person or attack person, you're trying to change an image, a design thing. They go when they make a bunch of mistakes. You don't have to pay someone else to fix it unless you have a backup. Also, we all have got experience. We've had to let someone go. It stinks. But it's true. I recently had to let go of an employee. In the past few months, I kept employees on for probably much longer. They should have. I just kept trying to find some way to not fire this person because I don't like letting people go, I said, Can you try this? Can you try that number eight different things that kept that try this. Try that one child and she just kept no matter what I would ask her to do, she would always do 40% of the task. At best. I could never get her to do the complete job, Violated said. Look, I've tried and tried and I should have fired you a month ago and I didn't want to fire you, But I know you need a job. I don't like firing people but you. No matter what I ask you to do, you never do it. You're I don't know if it's because you're incapable completing any task or what it is, but I just can't pay you not finish the job. And when you let an employee go, they often still have different levels. Access. Maybe they still know some of your passwords. Sometimes an ex employee, even when you let them go on the nights this way possible, or if you say Look, I simply can't afford to keep you anymore. Money's getting tight because things are slowing down. No matter what you say, some of these employees will want to go back and do as much damage as they can on the way out. I've seen this happen in real businesses. Physical business is my friend was working at a store in the mall when I was in college, and I watched him on his last day on the job. Steal as much as he could fit into his bag. He just loaded up his backpack with all the best stuff he could steal from. The story just walked right out. I was surprised. I had never seen someone do it before, but again, when he's the person who's in charge of store security and he's the manager, But it's his last day, employees don't know what to do. He walked out so fast, they were just confused. So people do it when they leave. They think, Oh, this employer didn't do me right. They owe me something and so they will steal stuff from you. They will damage stuff. The odds of this happening again are quite low, but still, if it happens, you're in so much trouble. In the fourth problem is dumb, dumb mistakes we all make dumb, dumb mistakes sometimes is employing. Sometimes it's us. Sometimes I'm working on something on my website and it does not work or I make it worse. The more you work for yourself, the more you'll learn about working on tweaking, testing and changing parts of your own website. The more you'll learn how the technology works, and sometimes you'll do things that make a mistake. One of my coaching clients very recently made a mistake as far as a tiny change and the theme he followed the instructions, they said he made a little change. An entire Web site shut down. That's freaking out. I've done it before as well. Very recently, I shut down my website and it took me three or four hours to figure out what was causing the problem to figure out which thing was glitch ing. And it happens here and there. Certain plug in sometimes conflict with certain other plug ins or different things in your back end. When an update comes out, suddenly we go in and try and make these changes in things we've done before. Start glitch ing, and when you do an update, which is reason number five to back up your sight when you do an update for your WordPress installation for your themes or for your plug ins. The website goes into maintenance mode now. Most of the time maintenance mode only lasts for three or four seconds. Almost none of your customers will see any customer loaded a page before or after maintenance mode will never see it. But if you attempt to visit a WordPress site during an update during those few critical seconds where it's uploaded the new update and it's now applying it where it's replacing a few files and that kind of stuff it says maintenance mode. Now if your update glitches, your website could get frozen in maintenance mode. This hasn't happened me for a while, but has happened in the past, and they probably have changed the way it happens so that people don't get frozen. Update motives much anymore. But I've definitely had happened where I was doing it. Upload or update and something frozen. The server, my Internet connection cut for a second and then the website. Get frozen update mode and you have to go and find through FTP, and it's very technical. The skeptic would file and deleted and reset your website. It's not easy to Dio. They probably made it a little simpler now, but Still, when you're updating anything could go rock. I recently went through a series of updates, and it messed up the log and page to my membership site. So I had to repay the guy who had designed the log in page because the coding was a little beyond. What I'm able to do was see SS stuff, which I'm not very good at, and I would have him go back and do it because the update had lost it for me. And now I figured out that I have to make sure he does work using a child theme or plug, and so that separate from the main installation so any other updates won't destroy it. But something got broken. Now, if I revert to my backup, everything would have been working again. So all of these air, different reasons why it's absolutely critical to back up your website, and there are two main backup tools that I recommend. Right now they're both free, which is a nice surprise ending. I'm sure you thought that his podcast, it was time to talk about spending big bucks on your backup solution. Right now, it's far as I can see. None of the paid solutions are better than the free solutions. I know it's crazy that I'm saying that I used to use two different pain solutions with both of them have stopped working, which is terrified they're still for sale. But if you look at the reviews, people are screaming because they back up their websites using his tools and then they didn't work. We're gonna talk more and more about back of being in a future update in a future episode. But you want to be sure you test your updates to see that they actually work. Making a backup is great, but if you try to deploy it or use it and doesn't work, your time has been wasted. And to do that to test a backup, you have to create a sandbox on your webs on your computer like a fake website. It's pretty complicated. One of my friends showed me how to do it, and you create this pseudo website in the sandbox, you and then you install the files to see if it actually works. That's the process now, the to plug ins that I use that I recommend one's called updraft plus two on one is called duplicate Er. Right now I've switched. I mostly use updraft lust. The reason I like it is it allows me to automatically update every week and send my updates. Thio, a remote server you can update to drop box. You can update two who will drive. You can send your updates to a lot of different places that are not just directly in your system. Having worked with duplicate ER, it's pretty good for smaller websites. But again, because my websites gotten so big every time I want to make an update, I was having problems and the way it generates updates, we have a really big update and you don't have a huge traffic to constantly paying. The update sometimes updates with time out or fail, but for smaller websites, for a lot of my smaller websites in the past, I've used duplicate er. They're both free. You want to set up your system very simply to update at a frequency that matches how often you do updates. If you write one block post a week, then you need to update once a week. If you're writing three block post today, you very much might want to back up every single day. Just decide how many blood posts you're willing to lose when you next have a crash or something catastrophic happens. If you don't mind losing a week's worth of work, either because you're only doing one block post a week or any other ISM Senate to once a week, you can set their frequency. You can set it up to update as often as you want until it how many backups to keep you can say update me every day and keep backups for 30 days. That's a pretty simple way to do it. That's how most corporations handle their backups. And then you can also say, Keep one monthly back up, going back for a while. One of the reasons to keep older backups is because sometimes you will discover that you had hacked a while ago, didn't catch it for a while. This could happen, so your backups have the hacking and as well. And so this is a way to bypass that, and we have multiple backups. Sometimes your server files are damaged, but you're episode content within a separate file so you can merge an older backup of all of your website design stuff with a more recent backup that just has your block post. And that way you can create something a little bit of a Frankenstein, but it's much easier to repair your website that way. At least that way, you sell your content. Bit of both, that's little more complicated. But this is why you absolutely, positively must start backing up your website today. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race hit over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's bestseller Serve No, master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. So you've just listened to another amazing episode of the serve. No master podcast. Make sure to subscribe, and we're back tomorrow with another amazing episode.