“We back up our servers” shows up on nearly every hosting page. It sounds reassuring, and it’s almost always technically true — and almost never the full picture. The details matter a lot more than the headline.
“We back up our servers” vs. “your site has a backup”
Server-level backups are often built for disaster recovery on the host’s end, not for you to self-serve a restore of your one site from three days ago. Some hosts charge extra for that kind of individual restore, or make you file a support ticket and wait. “We have backups” and “you can get your site back in ten minutes” are two different features.
Questions worth asking any host
- How often do backups run? Daily is standard for an active site; weekly leaves a lot of potential data loss on the table.
- How long are backups kept? A single daily snapshot doesn’t help if you don’t notice a problem for a week.
- Can you restore it yourself, and how fast? Self-service beats waiting on a ticket during a crisis.
- Are backups stored somewhere separate from the live server? A backup that lives on the same machine as your site doesn’t protect you if that machine fails entirely.
- Is it actually included, or a paid add-on?
What we do
Every Honest Servers plan includes free daily backups, kept separately from the live server, with no extra charge to restore. It’s not an upsell — it’s part of what “hosting” should mean in the first place.