Backup policy

What this policy says

Backups at Hostinium for Information Technology LLC are a paid add-on. No hosting plan includes a backup service, and keeping your own copies off our servers stays your responsibility. This page is the whole story: what we copy, how long those copies survive, what a backup costs, and what to do when an account is already suspended or cancelled.

Three things matter more than any of the detail below:

• We do take server backups on shared hosting, but we do not guarantee that one will be there when you need it.
• Copies older than 30 days are overwritten. Nothing on our servers is an archive.
• The only copy you can count on is the one you downloaded and stored somewhere else.

This policy forms part of the terms of service, and it works with the cancellation policy, which covers what happens to your files when an account closes.

The backups we take on shared servers

On all shared hosting servers we take daily, weekly and monthly full backups of cPanel and Plesk accounts, where server resources allow. A full backup covers website files, MySQL and MSSQL databases, and email.

Those three names describe how often the routine runs, not how old each copy is. The backup routine runs daily, so at points in the month all three copies can be a day old. Backups older than 30 days are overwritten by a newer one, and if you want to keep a particular copy you have to download it before that happens.

For the same reason, do not plan on our server backups to undo your own changes. A theme edit that broke a page, a WordPress upgrade that failed, a delete you regret the next morning — by the time most people notice, the copy they wanted has already been rotated out. Take your own snapshot before you change anything you care about.

None of this is something you have bought. We give no guarantee that a usable copy will exist at the moment you need one, and liability for lost data does not sit with us.

Email backups

Email stored in the mail directory of your account is backed up automatically with the rest of the account. The limit is simple: a message has to be sitting on the server for us to copy it. Unread mail and anything you can open in webmail qualifies.

If you read mail in a desktop program such as Outlook and it is set to delete messages from the server once it has downloaded them, your own computer holds the only copy of those messages and your sent mail. Back up that computer, because we cannot back up what is no longer on our server.

• IMAP leaves messages on the server by default, so they fall inside the account backup.
• POP often deletes them after download. Change the setting in your mail program to leave a copy on the server if you want old incoming mail included.
• Forwarded mail never reaches our backup system at all. A message forwarded straight to another address is only ever backed up by whoever delivers it.

The backup add-on for shared hosting

Because backup is an add-on service, the simplest time to take it is while you are ordering the hosting account. If you did not, you can add it later. The price depends on the size of the account:

We do not provide backups for accounts over 10 GB. If your account is bigger than that, plan your own backup routine from the start — the control panel tools handle it, and so does a backup product such as CodeGuard.

How to order. There is no self-service product for the backup add-on yet, so ask us and we will add it to your account. Open a ticket with the support department in the client area, or send a WhatsApp message to +1 202 505 2888. Tell us the domain and roughly how large the account is, and we will confirm the fee before anything is charged.

Getting a backup of a suspended account

A backup can only be generated while an account's status is active. That is a technical limit, not a commercial one: a suspended account is not running, so there is nothing to copy from.

If you want a backup of a suspended account but do not want to renew it, a one-time activation fee of $15 per account reactivates it. Once that is paid:

• the account is activated and you can download your backups yourself;
• you have 48 hours from payment to do it;
• when the window closes the account is switched off again and its data taken off our servers.

If you would rather we generated the backup for you, the size-based fee in the table above applies on top of the $15, based on the size of the account.

Getting a backup of a cancelled account

Start by asking whether anything is still there. When an account is cancelled, the website and email files on it are removed from our servers, and server backups rotate on the 30-day cycle described above, so the answer depends entirely on how long ago it happened. Open a ticket or message us and we will check before you pay anything.

If a copy does still exist, and the account is no bigger than 10 GB, these are the conditions for getting it:

• a one-time reactivation fee of $25, after which the account is activated and you can download the backups within 48 hours, before it is switched off again and its data taken off our servers;
• the size-based backup fee from the table above, if you want us to generate the backup rather than downloading it yourself;
• reactivation for this purpose does not renew the account. Keeping the service running afterwards is a separate fee, covered by the cancellation policy.

This is the one part of our policies where two documents can read as if they disagree, so to be plain about it: cancellation removes your files, and no fee brings back a copy that has already been overwritten. What the fees above buy is access to a copy that still exists. Download a full backup before your cancellation date and none of this applies to you.

Backups for reseller hosting

As a reseller you are responsible for backing up your clients' websites. We support that by selling extra backup storage space, which you can upgrade at any time as you take on more accounts:

The same rule about account status applies: an account has to be active before a backup can be generated from it. For a suspended or cancelled reseller account, raise a ticket with the sales department in the client area. What is possible depends on the size of the account, whether a backup is still available and how many accounts sit under the reseller, so we quote per case once we have looked.

VPS and dedicated servers

On an unmanaged VPS or dedicated server, backups are yours to run, in whatever form suits the workload — snapshots, database dumps, an off-site copy on a schedule. Where you buy server management from us, our team handles patching, monitoring and backups as part of that service, and what the backup covers is agreed with you when the management starts. Nothing in the shared-hosting fee table above applies to a managed server.

Your own backups

Every hosting account we sell includes the tools to take your own backups, and this is the part of the page worth acting on today rather than filing away:

• Download a full account backup from cPanel or Plesk and keep it somewhere that is not our servers — a computer, an external drive, cloud storage you control.
• Dump the database before you upgrade a CMS, change a theme or run a migration. It takes a minute and it is the copy people wish they had.
• Test a restore once. A backup nobody has ever restored is a guess, not a backup.
• Keep mail on the server with IMAP so that it falls inside the account backup.
• Automate it if you would rather not remember. CodeGuard takes scheduled off-server copies of a website and its database; ask us and we will tell you what it costs for your account.

Limits and liability

Server backups run where resources allow, as a convenience rather than as a product you have paid for. We do not promise that a particular copy exists, that it is complete, or that it can be restored, and liability for lost data does not sit with us. Keeping a current copy of everything you store here, somewhere that is not our servers, is part of running the account.

The full liability terms are in the terms of service. What happens to your data when an account closes is in the cancellation policy. How we protect the data we hold, and how long we hold it, is in the privacy policy.

Questions

Questions about this policy? Message us on WhatsApp at +1 202 505 2888 or open a ticket in the client area.