Uptime.com Blog

What is Disaster Recovery?

One of the most important things website owners need to know about is disaster recovery. As the name suggests, disaster recovery is a way for website owners to retrieve their data after a disaster has occurred.

In some cases, this means an actual disaster. Hurricanes, floods and earthquakes can damage the servers inside data centers. Most disaster recovery data centers are built in parts of the country – places like Wyoming, Utah and Nebraska – that rarely face natural disasters. That helps make sure that if something happens to the facility that hosts the website, the backup will be in a different location.

Most website hosting providers offer backup services. Depending on the plan, they can backup (or make a copy) of your data every week, every day, every hour or every minute. The more they do this the more it will cost, but it could be worth it in the case of an emergency.

Disaster recovery can also help with viruses. Say your website gets attacked by hackers and they damage the site beyond repair. You’ll have a disaster copy that can be reinstalled and put the site back to what it was at a current time. That’s incredibly important, especially as the number of cyberattacks seem to only increase from year to year.

Why It’s Important

If you’re lucky, you’ll never need disaster recovery. It earns its value when something horrible goes wrong, similar to home insurance. By using disaster recovery, you help secure your site from a number of things that can go wrong.

If you don’t backup your site and the information gets lost, you can lose many things of value, from customer lists and e-commerce transactions. And, you’ll have to rebuild the site from scratch. That all costs time, money and will set your company back. That’s why disaster recovery protection is a smart option for most website owners.

Michael Esposito