Our backup options

We back up your hosting daily so the worst-case loss is one day of data. Restoring takes a few clicks from the portal.

What we back up

For shared and WordPress hosting:

• Daily full backups — files, databases, email, and DNS.
• Stored on separate infrastructure from your live data.
• Retained for 30 days by default.
• Restorable from the portal in a few clicks.

For VPS:

• Weekly snapshots of the entire VPS (when backups are enabled).
• On-demand snapshots for major changes — bumping versions, before risky migrations, etc.
• Stored on separate infrastructure.

Restoring from a backup

For shared/WordPress hosting:

1. Go to Services → click your hosting → Backups tile.
2. Pick a backup point (we show available dates).
3. Choose what to restore:
   • Everything — full account restore (rare, big hammer).
   • Files only — recover deleted files or undo a bad upload.
   • Specific database — recover a database without touching files.
   • Email — recover deleted messages or whole mailboxes.
4. Confirm. The restore typically takes a few minutes.

For VPS:

1. Open the Backups tile on your VPS service.
2. Pick a snapshot.
3. Click Restore — the VPS reboots from that snapshot point.

Manual backups

Beyond our automatic backups, you can take backups yourself:

From the portal (shared/WP)

The Backups tile has a Generate backup button for ad-hoc backups. Useful before a major change you want to be able to undo.

From cPanel

cPanel's Backup Wizard (under Files) creates downloadable backups:

• Full backup — entire hosting account as a .tar.gz archive. Cannot be restored via cPanel itself, only by support.
• Home directory backup — just your files.
• Database backup — just databases.
• Email backup — just email accounts and messages.

Useful when you want a copy of your account on your own infrastructure.

Application-level

For richer, application-aware backups (e.g., WordPress backups with restore points before plugin updates):

• WordPress: UpdraftPlus or BackWPup are the standard plugins. Both can back up to your own cloud storage (Google Drive, Dropbox, S3) and restore granularly.
• Other apps: most modern apps have backup plugins or built-in export tools.

Application-level backups complement our server-level backups — they're typically smaller, faster to restore, and aware of application semantics (e.g., "restore just this WooCommerce order" rather than the whole database).

Scheduling automated backups

Beyond our automatic daily backups, you might want extra automation:

• WordPress + UpdraftPlus — built-in scheduling, multiple destinations, per-table granularity.
• Cron + custom script — write a backup script and schedule it via the Cron Jobs tile. Good for bespoke workflows.
• Off-site sync — rsync from your hosting to your own server on a schedule.

For most users, our daily server-level backups + UpdraftPlus weekly off-site backups is the right combination.

What our backups don't cover

• Real-time changes. The most recent backup is up to 24 hours old. If you delete a file 23 hours after the daily backup, you can recover it; if you delete it 23 hours after AND another 23 hours pass, the file is one day old in the backup.
• Live changes during restore. If you're actively writing to the database during a restore, the restore replaces ongoing changes. Best practice: take the site offline (maintenance mode) during restore.
• Things outside your hosting account. Domains registered with us, DNS at custom nameservers, third-party integrations (Mailchimp, Stripe, etc.) — those are separate.

Off-site copies

Our backups are stored on separate infrastructure from your live data, but still within the Flashcloud environment. For "what if Flashcloud disappears entirely?" disaster recovery, you'd want a backup somewhere outside our infrastructure.

The cPanel Backup Wizard or UpdraftPlus → cloud storage (Google Drive, S3, etc.) gives you that. We strongly recommend it for any business-critical site.

Testing restores

Recommendation: test your restore process before you need it. Once a quarter:

• Take a manual backup.
• Spin up a staging environment on a subdomain.
• Restore the backup to staging.
• Confirm the site loads, email works, content is intact.

A backup you've never tested isn't a backup, it's a hope.