Most small businesses with a WordPress site have backups in some form. Most of them are backed up by exactly one mechanism, and the one mechanism usually lives on the same server as the live site. That is one bad server day from being useless.
The standard for any business-critical site is two independent backup layers, kept separately, restoring different things, on different schedules. That is what every site on our hosting at Shout Websites runs. Here is what each layer does and why both exist.
The single-layer trap
Plenty of cheap hosts advertise "free backups" and tick a box on the spec sheet. Look at the small print and the backup is taken on the same drive that hosts the live site. If that drive fails — which is rare but does happen — the live site and the backup are both gone in the same instant.
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Contact HereSingle-layer backups also tend to be coarse. They snapshot the whole hosting account once a day, which is fine for a catastrophic restore but useless if you accidentally delete one image or one plugin breaks. Restoring the entire site to fix one wrong page is overkill and risks losing legitimate changes made in the last 24 hours.
Layer 1: server-level nightly snapshots
The first layer in our setup is a server-level snapshot taken automatically every night. This is a complete clone of everything in the hosting account — files, databases, email accounts, configuration — captured at the storage level.
Server snapshots are fast to create, fast to restore, and capture the exact state of the entire hosting environment. The downside is that they are coarse: you can roll back the whole account, but you cannot easily restore one component. They are your fallback for catastrophic events — a hack that corrupts the file system, a major hosting incident, a database table that gets dropped by a faulty plugin.
We retain the last 7 daily snapshots and 4 weekly snapshots on a separate storage volume from the live server. That separation is the point.
Layer 2: UpdraftPlus with off-site cloud storage
The second layer is UpdraftPlus, the WordPress-specific backup plugin we install on every site we manage. UpdraftPlus understands WordPress: it backs up the database, plugins, themes and uploads as separate components, knows the order they need to be restored in, and lets us restore one piece without touching the rest.
Critically, UpdraftPlus pushes its backups to an off-site cloud location — Dropbox, Google Drive or an S3-compatible bucket — entirely outside the hosting account. Even if both the live server and the snapshot storage failed at the same time (which would be a hosting-company-killing event), the cloud copy survives.
UpdraftPlus is also where granular restores happen. A theme update breaks one plugin? Restore that plugin only. A staff member overwrites the homepage? Roll back just that page. The site stays online while we fix the problem.
Why redundancy is the right answer
Backups are like insurance: you only learn whether yours was good enough when you actually need it. Two independent systems, kept on separate infrastructure, mean a single failure mode cannot wipe out both. The combined system has been tested in real recoveries on real client sites. We have used Layer 1 to recover from a hosting-side database corruption, and Layer 2 to roll back individual content mistakes more times than we can count.
What this costs you
Both layers are included as standard in our £300/month retainer alongside hosting, security patching, plugin updates, content tweaks and monthly performance reporting. There is no separate backup fee.
If your current website is on a setup you are not sure about, ring 07887 988780 and we will audit it. Starter rebuilds begin at £250.