Website Backup & Monitoring

Daily backups are the default and suit most websites. For sites with high content velocity (active eCommerce stores, busy CMS platforms, transactional applications), hourly or more frequent backups are available — the frequency is driven by your Recovery Point Objective, which we agree in writing during onboarding. The principle: how much data can you afford to lose if a restore is needed? Daily is fine if a day's loss is acceptable; faster if not.

Because we test them. Backup integrity is verified at three layers: checksum verification on every backup to detect corruption during transfer or storage; restoration into a staging environment during onboarding to confirm backups actually restore cleanly; and routine restoration drills on a schedule afterwards so verification stays current. This is the layer most providers quietly skip — they confirm backups ran without confirming they work.

Off-site in UK data centres by default, with optional secondary destinations for redundancy. Critical principle: backups are never stored only on the same server as the site they're backing up — if the server fails, both the site and the backups would be lost. Off-site storage is on a separate provider and geographic location. For compliance-heavy clients, we can configure specific data residency requirements.

Recovery Time Objective is agreed during onboarding. Standard restoration completes within 1–4 hours for typical sites, faster for smaller content. Pre-staged restoration runbooks make the process predictable. For sites with strict RTO requirements (eCommerce during peak season, transactional applications), we configure faster-recovery setups — including warm-standby environments where appropriate. We are explicit about what's achievable for your specific stack and budget.

Yes. Uptime is the baseline; performance monitoring covers response times, Time to First Byte, Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and Interaction to Next Paint. Performance regressions are detected and reported alongside availability incidents. For sites where ongoing performance work is needed, we coordinate with our performance optimisation and CDN service.

Severity-based routing. Critical alerts (site down, backup failure, SSL expiry imminent) trigger engineer triage within agreed response SLAs — a human looks at the issue and either resolves it or escalates appropriately. Lower-severity alerts go to dashboards for review rather than into inboxes. Alert thresholds are tuned during the first month of operation to eliminate noise from transient issues that don't warrant action.

Yes — for incidents that require your awareness or action. Most issues we handle without disturbing you (transient slowdowns, automatic-recovery events, minor anomalies). For incidents that affected your visitors, took the site offline, or required restoration, you receive a post-incident report with timeline, root cause, resolution, and prevention measures. Transparency is the standard, not surprise emails.

Backup configuration is a key part of ransomware resilience — backups stored off-site and on separate infrastructure cannot be encrypted by ransomware that compromises the live server. Retention windows ensure that even if a compromise goes undetected for days, an earlier clean backup is still available. Combined with our SSL and security management service for active threat prevention, this provides genuine resilience rather than the false confidence of having backups that the attacker could also encrypt.

Works with your existing hosting. The service is platform-agnostic — backup agents and monitoring probes integrate with any hosting setup that allows remote backup tooling and outbound HTTPS for monitoring. Where the existing hosting setup is the root cause of unreliability problems, we'll tell you honestly and recommend a migration to our managed website hosting, but we won't push you off a working setup unless there's genuine value.