Trusting fully web hosting services for blog post entries is risky. There are times that web hosting services fail. Technology in a sense is not fail proof. Most big web hosting services boast of fault tolerant network and computer systems. It only gives bloggers or clients a false sense of security on their data.

Nevertheless, fault-tolerant computer systems are subject to hardware or software failure. The difference will come as how the system will cope up with the failure. Hard disk failures, input or output device failures, driver failures, software bugs are some of the common problem that hits a web server which host blogs.

I have an unpleasant experience with Ploghost Web Hosting wherein web service goes down for prolonged periods of time without notice. Added to the agony is the seemingly incompetent customer service. My blog went down for a couple of hours without some justifiable explanation.

Happysteps.net is an example of a blog site hit by unreliable Ploghost Web Hosting service. Imagine the site going backdate to 4 months of old data and the customer support could not explain or help on how to resolve the issue. I am lucky; I was out of their service already. Trusting the valuable blog content entries entirely on some unreliable web hosting provider is an unwise move. Experience is the best teacher they say. A lesson from this kind of experience is to create blog site backup regularly.

Backup frequency will depend much on the volume and frequency of the blog post entries. The more often the blog contents are updated, then the more frequent the backups should be. For a WordPress Blog for example, what is important is to backup the blog contents stored on the MySQL database and the other (e.g. themes, plug-in, etc.) PHP application files.

Having a local desktop computer backup would be very valuable. The value would be very significant until the time of need comes. It’s better to play safe especially when your web hosting provider is unreliable.

Frequent server downtime is a red flag which indicates time to switch to a better web hosting provider. Backing up is a good practice. So, never wait to be hit big by unreliable web hosting service to start backing up your precious blog. The time to do backup of your blog is now!